


Peach Garden

by mizael



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient China, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, M/M, Multi, Wuxia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 08:03:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3843322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizael/pseuds/mizael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of a growing civil war, Crown Prince Yuuya finds himself caught in the politics and ambitions of mythical beings he's only ever heard of in fairy tales.</p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <i>Yuuya leans over and vomits immortality into his hands.</i>
    <br/>
    <i>It's red.</i>
    <br/>
  </p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	1. 春天

**Author's Note:**

> this is my personal pet project that i've been working on for a while, and i'm really excited to show you peach garden!  
>  it was originally prose practice that got out of hand but.... :')  
>    
>  it's set in ancient china and follows yuuya's adventures through a growing civil war
> 
> all art in this story is commissioned by me and may not be used anywhere else  
>  art for above is from [ji-menxi](http://ji-mengxi.tumblr.com/)

Spring comes in a soft frenzy of color, a sudden blossoming of reds and pinks and blues, where the whole world is smothered in gentle petal caresses and cotton sceneries, warm forests and living gardens. It’s around this time of year when they pick up their winter-woven wicker baskets and trot along the gardens, inspecting fruit on trees for those ready to be picked, eaten, and devoured for that is all the purpose they serve. They’ll pluck them from the bushes, each berry or hanging fruit picked too early for their time. That’s fine, they say, they’ll last longer.

There is always one tree they don’t touch in their routine, tucked in the center of their garden like a masterpiece on display, and when spring comes it’s a fusion of pastel pink and glutted green. It’s the peach tree, their _only_ peach tree, and instead of tearing fruit from its branches like hungry wolves on fallen elk, they bring out a blanket and place it on grass underneath. When the fruit falls naturally from their branches, they’ll go and pick it up, and place it in a separate pile from the rest.

“It’s so that we ensure the peaches are fully ripe and juicy,” his mother says when he asks, braiding locks of red under her fingers, weaving patterns like the wickers. Sometimes she adds in his tufts of green, like he’s some sort of twisted colorway of the peach tree. “The blanket prevents them from cracking.”

“Does it matter?” he remembers adding as they watch the falling petals in the garden, the lone peach tree in the center surrounded by soft fluffs of red and white. The other trees have been stripped bare, the bushes have been cleaned, and the only spots of edible color are the smaller ones left behind, deemed not worthy of picking. “Why can’t we take them now?”

“They say that if you pick a peach tree too early, it’s an invitation to misfortune,” she hums. His mother finishes braiding the hair in her hands and pushes it out onto his chest, where it hangs awkwardly over his shoulder.

He huffs at her explanation, cheeks rounded with air like the child he is. “But I want to eat peaches, mom.”

“In due time,” she leans down to kiss his hair. They stay a little while more on their perch under one of the numerous red canopies dotting the lake. The blossoms of other trees fall gently into the water, where they float peacefully in the invisible current, until the water weighs too much and they drown.

“When will they be ripe?”

His mother hums again. “In a few weeks, hopefully,” she says. He makes another whine but she shushes him with another kiss, and then a chuckle. “Good things come to those that wait, Yuuya.”

He remembers his eyes shifting over to the tree, staring hopefully for one of its fruits to drop, but the scenery does not change and he does not see what he wants to. Instead, a faint wind blew, rustling the leaves and the trees until his mother commented on the weather and went to fetch blankets for them both. He was left there, under the red canopy, red like his hair, hands gripping the edge of the railing as he waited with baited breath for one of the peaches to drop.

“It’s bad luck if they drop early,” his mother adds when she gets back, a lack of blankets in her arms. She tucks a strand of blonde hair behind her ear and gestures for him to stand up. “And besides that, it’s going to rain soon. We have to get back inside the palace.”

“That can’t be right,” he stands up anyway, the red and white silks around him dropping to the floor in a flourish as he ascends. “The sky’s still clear.”

“The wind blows rain clouds,” she echoes with a smile. Yuuya is ushered from the garden by his mother until they’re just about out of the cement bridge on the lake. She stops then, looks back with a worried face, eyebrows knit together. “I think I forgot my hairpin there.”

“I’ll get it for you,” Yuuya volunteers, and she laughs.

She pats him gently on the back in the direction of where they came from. “Well then, I won’t stop you,” her eyes dart to the sky, and then the blowing leaves, and hums an approval. “It won’t rain for another ten minutes, but be quick about it.”

Yuuya treks off back to the section of the lake they stayed at and his eyes light up as he sees the hairpin resting on one of the cushions they had the servants bring outside. He’s over in two steps, body bent over to pick it up, and then set to leave when the wind picks up again, blowing the long silks of his sleeves into his face. Yuuya blanches, and swats them away, but the wind blows the hairpin out of his hands until it knocks with a loud _clang_ against one of the poles and drops onto the ground.

He goes over to pick it up again, huffing. “Aaah,” he sighs. He twirls the perfect gold pin in his hand, laiden with emeralds and rubies like his hair. His mother rarely wears red. “But it’s pretty.”

Another gust of wind blows his flowing hanfu all over and Yuuya pouts as his vision is obscured by soft red and whites again. This time, he just waits for the wind to settle until he can push his hair from his face and smooth out the rest of his clothes. They are unnecessarily expensive, just a token to his status as Prince, but Yuuya doesn’t mind the multiple layers he has to put on everyday when he’s seen the work that goes into them.

“Right, hairpin,” he looks down at his hands, but the pin is gone. A thorough search of the nearby area doesn’t reveal anything remotely resembling his mother’s gold hairpin. Yuuya frowns, tries to upturn the cushions again but comes back with empty space and empty hands. “Mom’s gonna kill me.”

The air breathes a quiet breeze in reply, and he huffs. “It’s your fault,” he accuses the blowing wind. The wind just picks up again, makes the pillars around him howl in a mocking laughter. Yuuya rolls his eyes, but accepts his fate. “I just have to go and tell mom, then.”

He gives one last halting look at the peach tree across the way, bundles of red and white fabric in his hands so that he doesn’t trip over his flowing robes. He doesn’t remember why he had stood there for a while, staring back at the pink and green tree, as if hoping and waiting for one good thing to happen, for the peaches to drop.

He had sighed and turned around to go back, and understandably his mother had been disappointed, but she told him that it was fine, she could get another one. They trekked back to the palace together, hand in hand, and took shelter when the rain hit as she said it would. And then they’d had dinner together, watching the rain pour from their rooms in the height of luxury.

When Yuuya went to sleep that night, he looked out towards the peach tree again, now farther away than his view from the lake.

He remembers squinting, leaning out the second floor of the palace to check for a dropped peach, but nothing was on the blankets underneath. He’d sighed, pouted, grumbled, but shed his dressy hanfu and went to sleep.

(In the morning, he was greeted with a peach on the ground, split in two.)


	2. 缘分

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i decided to split this story into more parts bc i realized it's rather long for just five chapters  
> so this means more updates in less time, as well!
> 
> the art for this chapter was commissioned from [axikor](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=view&tab=userpage&id=62449) and [fiship](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=view&tab=userpage&id=63041)

They bury his father’s body in the last days of spring, when the flowers have stopped blooming and the trees stopped growing and the world freezes in its picture perfect state: idyllic and peaceful, quiet and serene. They bury his father’s body in a tomb with one thousand terracotta soldiers and a road paved with the words of his promises in each stone. They bury his father’s body in a large, empty mausoleum befitting of an emperor but not of Yuushou, all bright smiles and laughter and closeness and claustrophilia.

His mother doesn’t cry at the funeral procession, garbed in nothing but pure white robes with fleeting streaks of red--her tailor said it was a homage, Youko said it was for comfort. She only follows behind the white cotton soldiers with her white silk veil, white marble coffin and white funeral wear. They parade his father’s body around the city, businesses stopped in their mourning, passersby caught in grief, and even when the whole city sheds tears for Yuushou’s passing and the heavens pour as well, his mother looks ahead and doesn’t let a single drop of water escape from her eyes.

Later, when all is said and done and the coffin is buried beneath inch after inch of dirt with his terracotta army, Youko will retreat to the room they once shared and weep. She will feel the empty press of his bed, bury her face in the pillow he once used, and mourn the early departure of his passing. In the morning, her maids will exchange her tear-stained white for her imperial red, and no one but Yuuya will know of the grief that hides behind her eyes.

(She is the empress, and she cannot cry.)

Yuuya is wretched from his carefree days like a fish from water--he is dragged from his world with all the force of a fisherman on the hunt to feed his family, calloused hands pulling at him until he flies out of the lake. He flounders in the wake of his father’s work, his days spent in court with sneering politicians and leering officials, all of them bent on sabotaging him before he even gets off the ground. His mother works her days to pick up the affairs his father left behind until they can only see each other at the end of the work week, and even then for only a few sparing hours.

Youko does not throw herself into her work in her grief. Instead, she takes it all in stride and toils to the best of her ability, working day and night not to forget but to _remember_. After a while Yuuya sees that overcast cloud fade from her eyes, and they greet each other with smiles and kisses and bright laughter like his father would have wanted. They are stronger than that, his mother tells him. Much stronger. They are made of the marble his father sleeps in, born with souls of dying dragons desperate to live again. Through sheer will alone, they survive.

Yuuya keeps this in mind when he enters court every day, head held high with a smile like the sun, for he is the Crown Prince of this country and they will not break him. He walks in with a graceful flourish of his silks, all the posture that a Prince should have, and yet he moves with a boundless happiness that astounds the officials around him. Yuuya is strong like the quaking mountains and only millenias of rain will wash away his resolve.

When the nobles bark at him, he smiles and forgives them for their rudeness. When the politicians sneer at him, he laughs and waves them off for their ignorance. When the officials rage over a child barely prepared for rulership, he shakes his head and tells them politely that he is already seventeen, and he is far from a child. Every movement made to incite him is taken with a smile and a laugh, the iron will of an optimistic child stays in his eyes. Yuuya sits with his back straight against the seat at the head of the table, where his father used to dwell, and rules from his perch.

Beneath the sunny exterior, however, Yuuya wants to break down like his mother did. He wants to wail into the court that he is only seventeen and already the world has forsaken him. He wants to wail into the empty air that he is not yet fit to rule anyone or anything, when his brain has not even finished developing, when his life experience of seventeen years cannot account for all of his country. But Yuuya doesn’t say this, doesn’t show that he’s anything but ready, and instead still sits at the head of the table every day when he comes into court.

(“Even if you feel like crying, you must smile.”)

The peach tree taunts him with its hanging fruit when he visits, the branches stuck still in its picturesque state. Yuuya finds himself under the tree when he needs time to himself, when the pressures of court are too much and only the lone peach tree in the center of the royal gardens can help soothe him. No one comes by, no one visits, no one is _allowed_ because these are the royal gardens, and only royalty may enter.

Royalty, like--

He finds a beast beneath the tree, sleeping and breathing, white and blue fur fading into white and blue feathers on tucked wings. Bioluminescent horns curve from its deer-like head, two sets of blue-tinted ears on each side of its skull. Yuuya forgets to breathe when he chances upon it, regal in its slumber, snow white head buried under purple-blue hooves. It radiates an aura even from where he stands a ways away, hidden by the greenery of the plants around him, where the red of his silks become the red of fruit. It is a godlike aura, powerful and absolute, but gentle and merciful nonetheless.

Yuuya steps out from behind the plants and starts breathing again. The beast slumbers on underneath the peach tree, oblivious to his presence, and Yuuya wonders if it would be alright to get closer--to observe, to admire, to possibly touch--but he doesn’t linger too long on it. He walks forward in small steps, careful of the way the grass crunches beneath his feet, as if the smallest sound would awaken the beast.

He gets close enough to see the scalelike texture on the beast’s horns, straight and glowing like electric circuits. Yuuya stops breathing again, if only to stay quiet, and observes the beast from his three feet of distance. It is beautiful, regal, majestic, everything that everyone expects Yuuya to be is embodied within this slumbering creature.

“Amazing,” he whispers under his breath, but the peace has been disturbed.

The beast stirs.

It first shakes with a low rumble of discontent bubbling at the back of its throat, vibrating through its body in waves. The creature raises its head and blinks away the sleep from its bleary electric blue eyes, the color of a time that Yuuya has not seen before but the creature holds. And then it stands, hoof upon hoof, until Yuuya sees in all its majesty a mythical beast that towers over him with its four legs and bulky body, outstretched wings the size of humans.

“Hello?” he tries, scooting back to give it room, but the beast roars.

Its eyes catch sight of Yuuya and suddenly the wind howls with the fierce rap of its wings, like a miniature tornado has begun to sweep the area. Yuuya gasps and throws his hands over his head, ducks, rolls, and covers as best he can. The beast cries a note of surprise, startled, and then Yuuya hears the loud beat of hooves on the ground, wings flapping, wind roaring, and then silence.

The world stops, the wind quiets, the plants still.

Yuuya is left alone under the peach tree, surrounded on all sides by ripe fruit on the ground because the beast had knocked them all down in its fright.

The peaches are cracked.

* * *

Geometric patterned sunlight in tiny shapes of squares and rectangles spill onto his floor. A breeze rushes in and lifts the edges of the papers on his desk, as if beckoning them follow the wind back outside, but they are trapped underneath the large red paperweight in the shape of a bird--a fiery phoenix. A gift from an official’s son, made to woo Yuuya’s favor (and probably his feelings).

Sunny days are meant to be spent outside, basking in the rays of the heavens as he enjoys the peaceful and fleeting beauty of the nature around him. There’s something poetic to be said about the trees, the birds, the flowers--something that compares the charm of the plant life to human life, something about human roots and passion, about sedentary lifestyles and serendipity. There’s probably even more to be said of the still waters of the lake, the abundance of koi in the ripples, the tiny currents they create with a flick of their tail.

Yuuya wonders if there’s anything to be said about the beast.

“It sounds like a celestial being,” there’s a ruffle of fabric, and then warm, dark hands are on his collar. Masumi’s coal black hair comes into view, her red eyes boring straight into his naked frame. “You’ve grown a couple centimeters. We might need to make new hanfu for you.”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Yuuya draws his lips into a pout. “I’m capable of growing too.”

“Of course,” Masumi pulls a large swath of red silk from a nearby table and presses it against his chest. She tells him to hold a portion of it to his neck, and he does. She wraps a measuring tape around his waist and pulls. “Congratulations, your waist grew three centimeters.”

“ _Ow_ ,” Yuuya feels the wind go from his lungs as Masumi pulls the measure tighter. “Masumiii…!”

“Shush,” she swats his hands away and moves the strip of marked silk up to his chest. “Four centimeters. Even with all this growth you still have such a small body.”

“ _Hey!_ ” Masumi releases him. Yuuya hurriedly steps off the tiny stool she had him stand on and goes to put his clothes back on. “I’m not small, I just… have a late growth spurt.”

“Uh-huh,” she rolls her eyes. “Eat more meat. At this rate, the country might have a king that’s the size of a child and probably has the brain of one, too.”

“Masumi!”

She chuckles. “I’m teasing, Yuuya.”

Yuuya puffs his cheeks at her, much to Masumi’s amusement.

Masumi calls in the servants with a firm clap and tells them to take her equipment and materials out; she doesn’t need them anymore. They bow once at Masumi, twice at Yuuya, and then get to packing up the layout of different colored silks on the table, the length of measuring tape, the red handled scissors, the spindles of thread that lay innocently on the wood. Masumi takes the needles herself, gives extra care to place each one in a separate compartment in her box. Yuuya sees the detailed engraving on each one, and wonders if they were gifts from someone precious, with the way Masumi always holds them close to her.

When all is packed, the servants take the various boxes from the room at Masumi’s word and excuse themselves afterward.

“I’ll be back in a month with new clothes,” she tells him when he finally manages to come out of his musings. Her earrings jingle with every movement of her head--vibrant rubies like the color of her eyes. Her father is a jeweler, Yuuya remembers.

“Wait,” he reaches out and wraps his fingers around the sheer blue fabric of her coat, of which she wears glowing yellow silk underneath. “Don’t leave yet.”

Masumi blinks. “Why?”

“That beast, you said it was celestial,” Yuuya releases her coat and coughs into his hand, sheepish. “I just… do you know what it is?”

“Not really,” she knits her brows and frowns. “I’ve heard rumors, though. There’s probably a book in the archive if you want to look it up.”

“But the archive is so far away,” Yuuya pouts again. “And boring.”

“Honestly,” Masumi shakes her head with a sigh, though a smile plays on her lips. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“A name would be nice.”

“But I don’t know _for sure_ , Yuuya.”

“ _Masumiiii_ \--”

“Oh, alright. I think it’s called a Bai Ze.”

* * *

The peach tree is empty when he goes to visit again.

Yuuya reaches out and presses his hands against the trunk of beautiful black bark of the tree, fingers scraping the indents and ridges in the wood. The court has a day off today, something about family emergencies, about drought, about famine, about a part of the country he should care about but doesn’t, too caught up in the majesty of the beast he saw only a week ago. He wonders if that makes him a bad prince, if the beast does not want to see him because of his apathy--he wouldn’t want to see himself either.

He smiles sadly to himself. When did life lose so much meaning to him? Did the presence of the unknown really shake him more than the woes of his people? Perhaps four months ago, he would have cared more, would have helped his father sort out the panic of drought, would have sent out palace reserves to ease their pain.

But now?

Yuuya waits the whole day under the tree: sometimes he sits, sometimes he stands, but mostly he wallows in his self-pity, caught in the troubles and grieving of his own mind. People are starving, his conscience tells him, starving and dying. Do something, Yuuya. You have the power. You are a Prince.

_“Even if you feel like crying, you must smile.”_

The sudden thought of his father’s words knocks him off his feet, and Yuuya falls to the ground with a yelp. His red eyes stare at the dusk above him, a mix of pastel pinks, oranges, reds, and purples. They blend like the silks Masumi works with, her hands the black of the sky, her needles the burning stars. They blink down at him with their infinite beauty, infinite light, and he truly feels like an ant in the playground of the heavens.

“But sometimes it’s good to cry.”

The sound of another voice snaps him out of his reverie, and Yuuya is quick to push himself onto his elbows to try and find the source, but all he sees is a sliver of white between the trees. It’s gone as soon as he blinks, and he wonders if that was a figment of his tired imagination.

“Your Majesty!” one of the maids come running up to him. She bows once when she reaches the base of the tree and does not dare to get any closer. “Your Majesty, I’m sorry to interrupt, but her Imperial Highness has requested you to go and eat dinner with her.”

His mother, his mind tells him. “Oh, okay.”

He gets off the grass and brushes off the white silk of his robes with an absent-minded sweep of his hands. The servant waits patiently for him to collect his thoughts when he looks back to the peach tree and its empty branches. They’re supposed to be full, he muses, if he hadn’t startled the beast in its slumber.

He follows the servant back to the safety of the palace buildings and its tall red walls. Yuuya chances a glance back to the tree when he reaches the doors, and sees a spot of white in the same place he stood only moments ago.

“Wait,” he turns around and immediately runs back over. “Wait!”

The maid cries for him to come back, Your Majesty, _please_ , but Yuuya doesn’t hear her anymore. His feet carry him back to the peach tree, back to the beast he knows he saw, but when he arrives he feels nothing but the cool wind on his flushed cheeks, the promise of something that keeps eluding him.

“Your Majesty,” the maid is out of breath when she catches up to him. “Your Majesty, is something wrong? I can call the guards--”

The breeze teases him with a laugh; the leaves of the peach tree whistle with the draft. _There is nothing here_.

“It’s alright,” he finally says. “It’s nothing. Let’s go back.”

He sees a blur of white in the trees, the judgement of the gods on his frame. It feels like electric blue, sharp and fierce, piercing his very core. Yuuya feels as if the gaze tears him apart, as if the beast planned to rip him limb from limb until he is a hopeless mess of blood and gore on the floor, judgement received in the pieces of his body.

He stops.

“Your Majesty?”

“I…” his throat feels dry. He suddenly yearns for the plucked peaches of the tree behind him, wants to bite into a fresh fruit and feel the juice stream down his chin. “Do we have peaches?”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” the maid looks confused. “They’re in storage.”

“Take them out,” he swallows. His hands feel clammy. “We can… we have to send them down to the province in the south.”

“Your Majesty?”

“They have a drought,” the words spill from his lips like a torrent of water, like bile rising in his throat that threatens to overflow. “They’re in a famine. They need food and, the peaches are--they’re fresh--”

“Crown Prince Yuuya--”

“They’re fresh,” he repeats. “We have more things. We have wheat and rice. Send that down too. Wheat and rice and peaches.”

The gaze lifts, and Yuuya feels the breath re-enter his lungs.

It approves.

 _The beast approves_.

* * *

His mother smiles at him when he tells her that he took food out of the royal storage to send down south. She laughs and kisses him firmly on the cheeks as if he were a child again and Yuuya whines, _mooom_ , but she’s proud. She’s so proud, she tells him, so proud that he took action and did what was right. Yuuya flushes in embarrassment, tells her it wasn’t much, please stop kissing me like I’m a child, _mom please_ , and she laughs again.

“Alright, alright,” she rolls her eyes but the smile stays on her lips. “But you’re taking steps now, aren’t you, Yuuya?”

“I guess,” he still feels that gaze on his body. It lingers.

“That’s more than anyone else,” she beams. Youko claps twice and the servants off to the side step up at her command. “Tonight, we’ll dine with only essentials. Rice, and pork, and beans. Nothing else.”

Somehow it still seems like a feast.

* * *

_Bai Ze are creatures created from the hands of the gods themselves, said to contain their vast knowledge of the world and all the living beings in it. They only appear on earth in the era of wise, virtuous kings to bestow knowledge._

_It is said that a Bai Ze’s blessing is the most influential of all, for when a Bai Ze approves, kings will kneel before you._

* * *

Yuuya doesn’t see the beast for another two weeks.

He makes it a habit to visit the peach tree every day when he has time: before court, after court, after dinner, before bed, his days off--any free time he has he spends under the peach tree. He wonders if his persistence is something that drives the beast away, or if the beast is ever here when he’s busy, but Yuuya continues _hoping_. He doesn’t understand why he’s so enchanted, but. _But._

His efforts pay off eventually, when Yuuya thinks to stay inside for the day because the air is too hot, too unbearable, but he sees that flash of white under the tree again. He forgets the summer heat in his mad dash, grin plastered to his face, and he doesn’t let the beast out of his sight for the whole way there. Yuuya doesn’t dare to even _blink_.

“Please!” the first word out of his mouth is a plead, one that Yuuya says with all the intensity he can muster. The beast looks startled and steps back, but Yuuya tries again. “ _Please_. Please, don’t go.”

It stares at him warily but doesn’t move another step. Yuuya lets out a loud sigh of relief.

“I…” but now that he has the beast here, he doesn’t know what he wants to say. Why is he chasing after it? Why is he so desperate to meet its gaze? There are a thousand things he could say in response--curiosity, enchantment, wonder, awe--but he finds the words stuck in his throat.

“I’m Yuuya,” he tries for introductions instead. “Sakaki Yuuya, I’m the--”

“Crown Prince,” the beast doesn’t move its mouth but a voice fills his head. It’s surprisingly humanlike, with a rough grate to its voice, deep and low in a vivid resonance of bass. The beast steps closer and lowers its head until its snout is just at Yuuya’s eye level. “Sakaki Yuuya, prince of Zhong Bai, seventeen summers, next in line for the throne. Born to Sakaki Yuushou and Youko, the emperor and empress respectively.”

“That’s…” his name isn’t common knowledge. “How did you--?”

For a moment, the image of the beast flickers, and Yuuya feels the beat stop in his chest. Not yet. This is too soon. Not yet, not yet, _not yet_ \--

One blink for his tiring eyes, and the beast is gone.

In its place is a man, roughly the same height as him, perhaps a bit taller, with the whitest skin that shines like scales on his figure. The beast’s horns sprout from his head, the beast’s ears hang from face, and eyes of electric blue pierce into his frame.

It’s the beast--in flesh.

“I…” Yuuya tries to speak, but there are no words to describe the majesty of the man in front of him. Even reduced to a human form, the beast radiates its commanding aura: heavy, intense, and demanding absolute respect. It feels as though it’s meant to bring him to his knees.

“Unimpressive,” is the first word he speaks, and Yuuya recognizes the voice as the same one the beast spoke with in his head. In two strides he has his porcelain white fingers on Yuuya’s face, pressing and prodding with his eyes like daggers. “You can’t be him.”

“E-Excuse me?” he feels insulted somehow, but any hurt feelings he could possibly have are still blown away by the beast’s human form.

“Sakaki Yuushou’s child,” more prodding. The man draws a line with his finger down Yuuya’s jaw and then his neck, stopping at his collarbone. “No way.”

He feels his face flush from the intimate attention. “I am too!” he pushes the man away with a huff, all enchanted feelings lost in the insults that falls so easily from the beast’s mouth. “Sakaki Yuuya, son of Sakaki Yuushou! I’m going to succeed him on the throne once summer ends--”

“No, you’re not,” the man clicks his tongue in disappointment. “At this rate, you’ll run the country into the ground. What a fu--hellish hassle.”

“Just who are you anyway! Geez,” Yuuya crosses his arms with a tint of childish temper. Well, when someone comes up and starts doubting him for no reason… he has every right to be angry.

“My name is Yuugo, Guardian of the Celestial Gardens, creation of Lei Gong, servant to one of the four great Heavenly Kings, Yu Huang,” it all rolls off his tongue smoothly, like he’s done this a million times before.

Yuuya finds that most of it passes over his head completely. “Um…?”

“Gods,” Yuugo groans and just slowly massages his temples with his fingers. “I’m from Heaven and I’m a Bai Ze. Is that good enough?”

“Perfect."

Yuuya smiles.

Something in Yuugo's eyes flicker, the hint of recognition, the opaque blue that touches his cheeks: like blood, but not. Blood can't be blue because it's red.

"Did you want something?" Yuugo's eyes stray straight to the ground, that tiny bit of blue now almost gone from his stark white skin. Perhaps it's just a trick of the light, but Yuuya's _sure_ \--

"What?"

"You asked me to stop. You chased me all this way and waited here the past few weeks for me," Yuugo's eyes go back up to meet his, and despite the questions that he asks, Yuuya feels as though he already knows.

Like this is some sort of test.

"I just... well..." but he doesn't know himself. He doesn't know at all. Enchantment, possibly, but that's not the entire story. Even so, Yuugo looks at him with knowing eyes, centuries of wisdom and born intelligence--he knows but he doesn't say. "What are you... doing here?"

Yuugo blinks, and then his eyes harden, his stance softens, a white hand coming up to run fingers through the grey fibers of the fur pelt wrapped around his shoulders. For a long moment, there is only the wind. He doesn't speak a word.

"I-It's fine if that's private," Yuuya tries to say, tries to get Yuugo to stop looking so downtrodden. They've only met just minutes ago but Yuuya doesn't want him to leave-- _please don't_ \--the palace is stifling and the court even more so and he doesn't--he doesn't have any friends.

Perhaps he wants Yuugo to stay because he wants companionship, wants someone not intermingled with court politics and country politics and hierarchy politics and any politics at all to speak to.

(He wants to be weak, even if for the smallest of moments.)

"No," Yuugo looks at him with the glossiest blue, light bouncing and reflecting off of his pupils as if to hide something behind shields. "It's fine."

There is a light in his eyes that Yuuya recognizes all too well.

"I am here to mourn."


	3. 夏天

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM DYING THIS CHAPTER IS SO LONG...... i hope it makes up for the wait............ this isnt beta'd
> 
> college is starting again so i'm going to be incapacitated until it's over but i've been dying to try and update the past few months and, well... i finally did!  
> also spring semester is also con season for me so i'm... even more death as i try to prepare for katsu and sak and ota....... death  
> and a blatant plug for my [twitter](http://twitter.com/octomaidly) if you wanna chat
> 
> all art from this chapter is commissioned from [saha91](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&tab=userpage&id=142664) and [yumeayonie](http://sawayuu.tumblr.com/)

Before Yuushou left this world, before the last smile he shared was one when they parted ways for bed, before Yuuya had cried and cried and cried for his father’s lifeless body in the morning, clutching silk like lifelines, staining money with tears. Before Yuushou had told him to “smile” in the face of his odds, and before he could elaborate further, Yuuya had drifted.

The dream is the same every time: a throne in the spotlight, and Yuuya’s inability to sit upon it. Rather, he tries—he reaches with his hands, weighed down by gold, by silk, by materialistic things that surely should teach him a lesson about the value of wealth, but they are not what prevent him from ever sitting upon that throne. Oh, he _thinks_ it is, he thinks that his own want for expense is sinful, is greedy, and the gods will smite him before he takes that golden chair.

But when the nobles crowd around him, when the guards stop him in his tracks, they whisper only one thing: _you don’t belong there._ _You, who has sinned against the Heavens, are not fit to rule a country. You, who has tasted utopia, can no longer see reality. You, who has brought a creature of worth to its knees and broke their decree, you—this throne is not for you._

And Yuuya cries, _I have not! I have not!_ , clawing at his own guards as they push him away, as they take him out of the palace, as they pass by a garden that is vile and filled with thorns.

On those nights, his mother is by his side, running her fingers through the tresses of his hair, making no sound, no reassurances unless he asks for it. She knows as well as he that simple words like those are hollow, are only said in the moment and never more, but Yuuya will still ask, as if he is eight and a child again, crying tears not from his dream but from the thunder.

_The rain is part of how life goes._

Are dreams, too, then?

His mother had smiled, pushed her fingers against his scalp and rubbed circles there, had not said a word until Yuuya had stopped shaking, stopped clutching the lapels of her sleeves in a vice grip as if she would disappear at any moment.

“Yes,” she’d said, the moon high in the sky and her voice weary from sleep, but she never once reprimanded Yuuya’s dreams (nightmares, visions—). “Dreams are said to show your own fears and growth. Maybe even your future.”

“But I haven’t done anything—”

“You haven’t,” she kissed him on the forehead with another smile. “Nothing is set in stone, Yuuya. As cheesy as it sounds, you pave your own road. Remember that.”

And she had left, drifting like a ghost into the night, the flow of silks behind her. She was— _still is_ —an anomaly upon the palace, a commoner who rose to higher standing. Where his own teachers would have told him that fates were inborn, his mother believed otherwise, and she would laugh in the face of their decree, using herself as an example that they never could argue.

There are those born out of fate, and there are those born _outside_ of fate.

_“My name is Yuugo, Guardian of the Celestial Gardens, creation of Lei Gong, servant to one of the four great Heavenly Kings, Yu Huang.”_

Yuuya begins to wonder which one, exactly, he is.

* * *

“Would you like to come in for tea?” had been a simple request, an effort to get Yuugo to stay longer than his usual time, before the celestial being would break away from the garden and leave Yuuya back in his boring world of politics, untouched by the unearthly awe that carries Yuugo’s every step (every stride, every strut—a wake of mist in his trail like Yuugo is a mountain that can never be conquered, resting high above the clouds where the summit would freeze all humans that came near).

Yuugo had blinked, his only show of his own surprise, but agreed nonetheless. Yuuya had smiled wide from ear to ear, the joy creeping upon his body until he could do nothing but take Yuugo’s wrist in his hands and tug him in the direction of the palace. Yuugo had protested, saying something about being able to walk there himself, but never made a move to pull out of Yuuya’s grip.

Telling the servants that they would be serving a celestial being would have caused panic and questions, so Yuuya takes Yuugo through the back door, steps hurried and excited but silent and cautious of anyone that came their way.

“We could just have tea outside, you know,” Yuugo says, pressed against a wall as Yuuya leans his head around the corner and checks for anyone in the next pathway. “You could have the servants bring it over while I hid.”

“Yeah, but,” Yuuya gives a small tug for Yuugo to move as they race down the hallway, silks billowing behind them and giving life to Yuuya’s laughter. When they reach his room, finally, Yuuya beams and gestures dramatically to the entrance. “A room is just for the two of us, right?”

Yuugo opens his mouth to say something, but stops, eyes looking down at the floor as his cheeks tint blue, but Yuuya only has a moment to confirm that before Yuugo covers half his face with his sleeve in an attempt to cough.

“R-Right,” he agrees, coughing (clearing his throat?) a few more times before he shakes his head as if to reaffirm himself.

Yuuya’s chambers are a combination of two rooms: a parlor area and a space with his actual bedroom, his bed built into the wall and covered by curtains. Yuuya leads Yuugo over to a seat in the middle of the parlor, at a small square table outlined in gold. The height of luxury.

Yuugo’s frown goes unnoticed by Yuuya, who goes over to smaller table against the wall to pour the already-hot tea sitting on there. He had planned to have tea after going outside to the peach tree anyway, but Yuugo’s presence is a definite welcome.

“So, I’m—”

“Yuuya,” Yuugo says, gesturing to the other seat across from him. “Sit down?”

“Oh, right!” Yuuya hurriedly brings the tray of tea over and sets it down before taking his seat. He eagerly places Yuugo’s cup on the table along with his own. “I made this tea myself.”

“Did you?” Yuugo takes a sip out of courtesy and then blanches. “Wow, this tastes horrible.”

“Hey!” Yuuya puffs his cheeks up, leaning over the table slightly as he stares at Yuugo intently in the eye. “I think it tastes _fine_.”

“Have you actually tasted it?” Yuugo tries to keep his face straight, but it fails with how his brows scrunch up. “This tastes like sh—just bad.”

Yuuya whines, lips drawn down in a pout and a frown, brows furrowed. “Just because I’m not an expert tea maker in whatever godly land you come from doesn’t make my tea _that bad_.”

Yuugo levels him with a _look_.

Yuuya takes a sip of his tea.

“So?”

“Okay, it’s a _little_ bad.”

Yuugo wears a smug look, but drinks the rest of the cup anyway, saying something about not wanting to waste food (but it comes out like “N-Not like I want to waste your work, either” except mumbled, that flush of blue tinting his cheeks again, and Yuuya starts to believe _that_ is his blood: blue and exotic, not anything like a human’s, _never_ anything like a human’s).

Yuuya still smiles, watching with a sort of satisfied contentment as this godly being—Guardian of the Celestial Gardens, creation of Lei Gong, servant to whoever and whatever and a lot of other titles that he can’t care enough to remember right now—sits in his room and makes himself at home. This is how emperors rule, right, spending mornings with beings that are higher than man, that no common peasant should ever be able to meet.

The tea is finished between them, little sweet and small snacks lying on the table instead, pastel greens and pinks, little balls of dough with paste inside. He didn’t used to like them because they were too sweet, like a mass of sugar sliding down his throat, but in the presence of Yuugo’s wonder and genuine enjoyment, he finds that he does.

A laugh escapes him, then, more like a fit of snickers that has the beast confused, brows scrunched together in a “Hey! I-It’s not funny! What are you laughing at?!”

“You’re really cute,” he says in response, between giggling breaths and escaping laughter, the creases at the corner of his eyes. For a moment, in _this_ moment, Yuuya smiles—not a plastic smile, not a smile forced by the mask he wears—

Yuugo inhales sharply, the breath leaving his lungs. Yuuya thinks for a long minute that he’s crossed a line, maybe said something he shouldn’t have, but Yuugo doesn’t say a word.

He doesn’t need to, Yuuya realizes later, when he’s lying in bed and watching the moon through his window, the curtains around him parted for a last glimpse at the outside world. The moon is bright, calm, serene, a water that soothes his mental aches and washes over all his old wounds. The moon—like Yuugo—is something that is far beyond his reach, a being that exists to be admired and not touched, never to be close to, never to satisfy.

But in that moment, Yuugo had smiled, blue lips and blue veins, white fangs and white skin: a sky covered with clouds, an eternally white, snowy garden that freezes all the movement in his body. Yuuya had let himself go, had faltered and let the cup drop from his hands, staining red-hot tea over his hanfu and burning the skin under. He wishes he could say the tea shocked him back to reality, to the walls he had put up only a season ago to deal with the loss of his father, to the rigid facade of happiness he has tried his hardest to keep.

The tea stain is still on the floor, Yuuya reluctant to clean it up, reluctant to get rid of the trace of existence that Yuugo had appeared in his life (had _smiled_ at him, all sharp edges and graceful elegance and _nothing at all_ like pity). It smells like chrysanthemum leaves, ground and dried, pushed back into water again to regain the life it once had. It was something beautiful, and even in death, even in a pseudo-second-life, it creates tea from the ashes of its remains, warm and soothing.

A desire to live but a desire to rest. Yuuya remembers how his father would have wanted him to do the same: to smile, to laugh in the face of his demons, to help those who cannot to do the same. Life isn’t supposed to be fleeting, gloomy—

Yuugo had smiled, sapphire blue and gentle cobalt, the faintest dusting of aquamarine on his cheeks. He had _smiled_ , and Yuuya had stopped.

Yuuya had stopped because he had forgotten what a genuine smile looked like, so foreign on the face of someone even more otherworldly.

( _Love_?)

“Y-Yeah, sure,” Yuugo had said, turning his eyes down and hiding his smile behind his sleeve, the pattern of leaves and flowers on the silk almost like a forest for him to retreat to. “You also… I-I mean… you too.”

Yuuya falls into summer’s embrace; he falls into a dreamless sleep accompanied only by the chirping crickets and the soft moonlight, the fading presence of the gods on his shoulder.

* * *

Afternoons, they come and go. Yuuya waits every day by the peach tree, hoping to catch a glimpse of Yuugo, hoping to catch a glimpse of a life he can’t have, with a being he can’t tether. Sometimes Yuugo appears at his side, and they spend the afternoon with the small pastries Yuuya has brought: deep-fried sesame balls and freshly baked custard tarts, crumbs spilling onto their hanfu that Yuuya laughs at when Yuugo goes on about which goddess or mythical being had sewn his clothing.

 _It’s precious, you know!_ and _They’re going to_ kill _me_ and _By the Goddess, I swear if this oil doesn’t come off—_

“But then why do you keep eating them if you keep spilling crumbs all over? I’ve never even met such a clumsy being of the gods,” Yuuya teases, a wide grin on his lips, leaning over the picnic basket to help Yuugo sweep the crumbs off his hanfu.

“Th-That’s because…!” Yuugo starts, stumbling over his words, the blue rushing to his face, coloring his white skin. He coughs into his hands, eyes darting away. “Y-You go through the trouble to bring them… n-not like I don’t like them or anything! I mean! Y-You…!”

Yuuya laughs, letting his body weight fall forward to land softly on Yuugo’s lap, staring at the sky from his vantage on the very body created by the gods.

“I-It’s free food, okay,” Yuugo crosses his arms with a huff, turning his chin upwards and trying his hardest not to look down on Yuuya laying his head in his lap.

“Do you even _need_ to eat?”

“Shut up.”

The days pass by quickly, afternoons spent in wonder and awe, and nights wishing for the next afternoon to come sooner.

Yuuya finds doesn’t care about politics—he doesn’t _care_ about his court or his throne, his people or his officials—if Yuugo comes every day to visit, if he can spend the rest of his life like this, bound in the existence of the heavens itself, then what should it matter if his country needs him? What should it matter, when the only person who Yuuya could ever need is Yuugo?

Yuugo, who smiles at him and doesn’t berate him. Yuugo, who absently runs his hands through Yuuya’s hair when they’re watching the clouds together, who then snaps away when he realizes what he’s doing, to Yuuya’s laughter and teasing. Yuugo, who has his heart on his sleeve, the blue flush of his cheeks something that Yuuya all too happily basks in the light of.

Is it Yuugo, or is it his attention?

(Or perhaps it is Yuuya, who hides his feelings and intentions behind the hardiest metal, plastering onto his face a mask that will never leave. He doesn’t care, he tries to say, as if he isn’t taunted by the dreams of denial and rejection, dreams of being outcast into a world he doesn’t know, hated by people he does.

 _He doesn’t care_ , he _wants_ to say, because it’s easier, because he sees how Yuugo lingers his eyes on his figure, an affection that shouldn’t be there that is ever-present in his blue eyes: the depths of the ocean, come to swallow him whole and drag him down to the undertow, where his screams will never be heard in the vacuum of space.)

* * *

If only.

* * *

Yuugo says something one day (asks something one day)—voice loud and clear.

It’s like watching a flower bloom from a mere seed to wonderful petals that face the sun, tinted blue-gold in a copy of the sky, a plant that is determined to become as beautiful as the world up above it, where the heavens that hold more than just stars rest. It is long, subtle, roots sprouting underground to grab a place on the earth, a stem that breaks from a perfect shell, the desire and need to reach for the sky. It comes in years, in rain, in survival through the seasons that will bear down on it, push it back into its shell.

Yuugo has no need to be that flower, has no need to reach for the Heavens when he is _from_ the Heavens, from the playground of the gods up above (even if he, he says, a little bit of bitterness in his voice, a little bit of sadness— _even if he himself is a toy of the gods_ but Yuuya doesn’t know what that means). But his presence enough is to be that flower, be the life that sprouts from soil in the way he moves and talks. The sunlight catches his skin, porcelain white and shining, soft like flower petals, and Yuuya has to step back and admire.

(Ironic, then, isn’t it, when Yuugo’s eyes are like harsh blizzards, like icicles that will tear into his heart and expose him whole for the rotten soul he is, must be, could be, can be. In the summer heat, in the summer haze, in an endless time loop of Yuuya’s red eyes blinded by Yuugo’s blue, he feels the sting of a celestial being, feels the sting of his dreams (nightmares) when his officials deny him of his throne.)

Yuuya has to remember, above all else, that Yuugo is not a human even as he looks like one (when his fur fades into skin, when his four legs become two). He is a Bai Ze, the being above emperors, the beings that _make_ emperors.

But—

“You aren’t fit to take the throne,” Yuugo says, brows furrowed, as if he himself could not understand why this was so. “You aren’t even _close_ to being fit. What happened? Why is this?”

And Yuuya wants to laugh, wants to cry, wants to tell Yuugo all about the depression that makes him smaller, smaller, _smaller_ by the day. He wants to tell this high celestial being that humans are weak and fragile and that he is coming apart at the seams, and even an anomaly such as Yuugo is enough tandem in his life to at least give him some hope for the future. He wants to tell Yuugo about court, about the sneers from the officials, the scheming politicians, about his dreams of waking up on his coronation and being denied the very thing he was born for.

But this is unfair, the injustice of it all. Yuuya had seen utopia once, had let it grow from his bones like vines and obscure his vision, had seen the world in perfect color and harmony, and all the potential it could ever hold. He had seen it—he had _grasped_ it!—

The vines are dead, now. His bones are rotting. His ideals are gone, buried in the dirt beneath their feet, buried with the one thousand terracotta soldiers guarding his father’s body.

“I don’t know,” he says, half-lying, half-not. “I’m fit, I’m sure of it. I try so hard, I study so much—”

“H-Hey!” Yuugo moves closer, hands hovering over Yuuya’s face, as if unsure on how to proceed when Yuuya looks on the verge of crying. “I-I don’t mean this in a mean way…. don’t cry okay? Y-You can’t cry! You’ll make me cry!”

“Th-That’s not possible,” Yuuya hiccups, trying to laugh and cry at the same time as he pulls his sleeves up to wipe his tears. “That’s almost… pathetic!”

“I’m not the one crying!” Yuugo says, puffing his cheeks out as he moves a tiny bit closer, and frantically tries to wipe Yuuya's tears too, brushing aside Yuuya’s own sleeves. “Geeze.”

“H-Hey, you’re starting to shake, too—”

“Th-This is your fault!”

Yuuya laughs, a loud, resounding note that drops into a choked sob, the noises spilling from his mouth a mixture between it all. He inhales, exhales, tries his best to regain his composure but it is like a dam has broke, the water that is his emotions flooding from his being, drowning every part of him until he can’t breathe. He tries to stop, he tries his hardest to not break down, but.

Yuugo is patient, so much more patient than Yuuya can ever give him credit for. He doesn’t say much else as Yuuya tells him his troubles, his dreams, his nightmares, all of his problems falling out of his mouth like Yuugo is meant to help him, to heal his mind. Perhaps some part of him wishes that were so, that Yuugo could put his soft white fingers to his head and mutter enough words to heal the scars on his mind and he’d be _fixed_.

Yuuya doesn’t realize how much his father’s death had hit him. He don’t realize it because his mother had done all the crying for him, and the officials would have surely seen it as a sign of weakness.

Court politics are harsh, never meant for a boy who is only seventeen, never meant for a boy who has never seen the world outside of his palace walls.

He doesn’t know how long he cries for, and maybe it’s best if he doesn’t, but at the end of it Yuugo takes his face in his hands, brings him close enough so that the two of them can touch foreheads. Yuugo’s own eyes seem wet and watery, but he hasn’t cried like Yuuya has, just felt the lingering effects of his sadness and depression wash over him like the ocean washes gently over the sand.

“Do you want to be emperor, Yuuya?” he asks, hushed voice and small whispers, as if the answer were only a secret to be whispered between them. His fingers idly caress the skin of Yuuya’s jaw, his eyes boring into red, and Yuuya wonders if the sudden _thump-thump-thump_ of his heart is from Yuugo’s proximity or his offer.

He isn’t sure which one he wants to admit.

But—”Yes,” the word escapes him like a desperate plea, a plea that has long since been known in his heart: a plea for love, for attention, for the very revelry he bestows upon Yuugo’s every step. He had wished (and he continues to wish) that someone would do the same for him.

And being emperor? Being emperor just guarantees that, doesn’t it?

How selfish he must look to this being of the gods, this mythical creature that creates and controls emperors, kings… _him_.

“Yes,” Yuuya says again, with more conviction, with more _heart_ , with a rush of feeling that courses through his body. He reaches up and grabs Yuugo’s wrist, lock him in his hold, because Yuuya is _desperate_ and _pleading_ , and Yuugo is the one source of salvation that he will not let go. Not now, not ever.

Something in Yuugo’s eyes spark, then, like the very electricity his eyes embody.

Yuuya is a lightning rod and Yuugo is the thunder, and Yuuya will absorb every single drop of power from this celestial beast. He can make him emperor, and he—

Yuugo’s eyes soften, his hands shaking loose Yuuya’s grip from his wrists until he can take his fingers and palms in his.

“I know,” he says, and then looks at the palace. Red and gold and white and brown, painted like a beacon of paradise, a heaven only those worthy enough (rich enough) shall know. His eyes don’t look at the decor, the statues, the general imposing structure that is the royalty’s city within a city. His eyes travel elsewhere, somewhere only he can reach (somewhere only he can see).

“Yuugo?”

“I know,” he repeats, a whisper this time, a gentle smile on his mouth. His eyes turn back to Yuuya, so full of _warmth_ , so full of _love_ —“I’ll help you.”

Yuuya wonders then if even gods can be controlled.

* * *

It begins like this—

Afternoons are spent no longer under the peach tree, dozing with the summer heat and haze, blearily looking through the gaps of the leaves at the sky above. Yuugo arrives with a pinpoint precision, hardened eyes and determined posture, has Yuuya tell him how his days go in court, how his studies go with his tutors, what he has done since their last meeting.

It begins like a sudden shift in the wind, a rising tidal wave that Yuuya struggles desperately to adapt to. Here in front of him is not _Yuugo_ , not the person he has known with soft smiles and flushing cheeks, embarrassed noises that claw out of his throat when Yuuya teases him endlessly for his quick reactions. Here is a heavenly servant, _a celestial being_ , radiating power and influence through the sheer force of his words alone.

Here is the creature that makes kings, crowns emperors, guides those who are wise and those who are not. Here is the creature that can call forth a rainstorm with naught but a word and a gesture, can weave the very fabric of life with his porcelain white hands and clawed fingernails. Here is a creature that can rip an entire kingdom to shreds.

Here is a creature—here is _Yuugo_ —who carries himself with a grace unmatched by any other living creature, the poised posture of a crane.

The poised posture of a _beast_.

“Court politics are always the same no matter where you go,” he says, pacing the length of Yuuya’s room with a steady tempo, the translucent trail of his hanfu scraping the floor behind him. “Everyone always wants to both appease you and oppose you. Of course, subtly. Their noble code doesn’t allow them to do so otherwise.”

“But these are officials who have studied and tested,” Yuuya says, drumming his fingers on the hard bamboo of his desk, eyes focused on the quiet outdoors, on the peach tree where they used to spend their days. He almost wishes they could go back to them, spend their afternoon eating and talking and enjoying each other’s company… _almost_. “They took an exam to get in.”

“Which means they’re more intelligent,” Yuugo deflects with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They know better how to get under your skin, and how to tug at your heartstrings. At least the nobles are all a bag of predictable di… _people_.”

Yuuya snorts, raises an amused eyebrow at Yuugo’s constant correcting of his own vocabulary. “Yuugo.”

“What?” and here, the other Yuugo returns, the one who blushes blue and hides his face behind his sleeves, all semblance of importance and power gone within an instant. “Y-You know what I mean! I’m trying, okay? And Rin always hates it when—”

“—Rin?” Yuuya feels his entire mind blank right at the name. It’s the first time Yuugo has ever mentioned anyone else that isn’t a god he serves (or those that he knows).

Yuugo pales, his jaw going slack, and then immediately waves his hands around, his sleeves obscuring his vision. “F-Forget I said that! A-Anyway, back to the—”

“But who is _Rin_?” Yuuya asks again, leans forward on the table with his body weight and stares Yuugo right in the eyes. Any information about this celestial beast, _any at all_ —Yuuya will take it. He wants to learn more, to know more.

(Yuugo had said once, during one of their picnics, that he only had the rest of the summer to stay before he would be called back up to serve. He had hesitated, had looked at the sky so forlorn and sad that Yuuya didn’t want to press further. Whatever made his eyes water, whatever made Yuugo look like he was about to _cry_ —Yuuya didn’t want to know what made a celestial being _cry_ at going home.

 _Home_ , Yuuya tests the word on his tongue later, when he’s alone. _Home_ , Yuugo had said, because the palace wasn’t _his_.

Someday he will have to go _home_.)

Yuugo goes silent, the hesitance in his frame, the uncertainty that plagues his twitching fingers, the longing that Yuugo gives to the lake outside.

“Rin…”

In his voice there are a thousand words he wants to say, each one of them powerful, sonorous, _waiting_... waiting to be spilled unto the world but Yuugo does not talk further. There hangs a heavy silence in the echo of that name— _Rin_ —whispered with a reverence that Yuuya has never heard him use before, not even to his creator, not even to his god. Yuugo walks over to the window, lets his fingers and claws curl around the geometric patterns that make his windowsill, eyes staring long and hard at the body of water outside.

“Rin is… she’s…” it’s a whisper, almost like a prayer, and Yuuya doesn’t try to press it but it burns; the curiosity sits in his heart and sparks a million candles in the depths, gently lulling and lulling until everything is burning, burning bright, burning forever. “I haven’t seen her in years… she’s been alone since her brother died, and, I… she went missing last year, she’s _gone_ , and Rin doesn’t…”

A pause, Yuugo’s grip on the windowsill tightening with his strained breath.

“She’s always been there for me, she’s always been so patient with me,” Yuugo goes on, a rush of words flowing from his mouth as if he couldn’t _wait_ to tell Yuuya all about her, speaking in the same hushed reverence that he reserved only when he spoke to Yuuya. “She means the _world_ , and I…”

Yuuya feels a tug at his chest, a harsh pull of his heartstrings that has him gasping for breath. It _burns_.

But is it his curiosity that burns, or is it his ugly jealousy (even if he already knows the answer and just refuses to admit it)—

It is a different kind of burning when Yuugo takes his hands, Yuuya heaving with a startled gasp, his breath uneven and shaky. Yuugo’s hands are porcelain white like fine china, not human in the slightest, not like the burning red flush on his cheeks and the loud drum of his heart in his ears. Yuugo’s blood is blue, different, his skin heats up in dazzling cyan and splotches of cobalt, imperfect asymmetry within perfect celestial skin.

Yuuya is reminded that he is human, that the being in front of him is _different_ and _not_ , and the sheer power in his eyes could bring mortals to their knees.

(Brings Yuuya to his knees.)

“I miss her,” he says, clawed white hands tangled about in Yuuya’s tanned skin and fingers. “I lost her, Yuuya, and I… I can’t bear to lose _you_ , either.”

Yuuya wants to say something, a word of reassurance, but the only thing that comes out is a sigh of relief and happiness, the ugly feeling fading in his chest.

Yuugo loves him as much as he loves Rin and that is—that brings such a warmth to Yuuya’s body, such a relief.

Yuuya can only imagine a being as great a beauty as the Bai Ze in front of him, electric blue shining and shining in the thoughts of someone (not him, not him) else.

And there is silence (silence) when Yuugo stops in the middle of his story, realizing he’s said too much. Too much for a mortal.

(It is a different kind of burning when Yuugo takes his cheeks and presses their foreheads together but there is that look in his eyes—sad, sorrow, forlorn—as he looks at Yuuya. Too much for a mere _mortal_.)

* * *

( _If only he could dance in the skin of the immortals, reach for a heaven that he can touch, sing the songs of the stars up above. If only he could be like him, if only he wasn’t mortal—_ )

* * *

 “Would you like to do something else today?” had been a simple question, an effort to take Yuugo’s mind off of his hurried absence the other day, before they could both descend into the messy world of politics and corruption, discussing things like _how to run a country_ and _how to maintain court_ when Yuuya is only seventeen and already has to age so much quicker than his brain can allow.

Yuugo is like an open book, the way he almost immediately wants to say _yes_ in the spark of light in his eyes, the pitch of his body forward just the tiniest bit. “No,” he says instead, turning his head to look at the back door to the palace, his entrance and exit to the confines within. “We should keep trying to—”

“Come on,” Yuuya grins instead and takes his hand in his, giving a firm tug that has Yuugo stumbling after him, his half-hearted complaints and protests failing to reach the laughter in Yuuya’s voice, the spring in his step. The days have gone by at a stagnant pace, the wonder and awe that Yuugo had first commanded all but fading with time. Yuuya doesn’t want that; Yuuya wants to look forward to meeting Yuugo every afternoon, feel his skin beneath his, the shy brush of his lips against his face.

For some reason he can’t remember, Yuuya drags him all the way across the palace to the archives, uncaring of the people or officials that he stumbles upon along the way, looking with bewilderment as Yuugo passes with his snow white skin and ocean blue cheeks, the weave of his hanfu anything but less than expensive. Yuuya drags him into the archives with the shelves and rows of books, his purpose forgotten, but the pure childlike adrenaline that had flowed through his body had been worth it.

The spark in Yuugo’s eyes, too—it had been worth it.

“Y-Yuuya… haaah,” Yuugo puts his hands on his knees and leans forward to catch his breath, the fur mantle around his shoulders almost sliding off. Yuuya laughs and walks over to fix it for him, the run nothing more than a cinch for him, but it’s like Yuugo has never ran before in his life.

Perhaps not, at least, in his human form.

“Welcome to the archives!” Yuuya says without letting him get a word in, the grin big on his face and his hands flung wide. His laughter bounces off the walls and echoes throughout the building, his voice traveling much farther than he had thought it could. “There’s nothing here but… well… a lot of books! And no one really ever comes by.”

Yuugo, however, isn’t looking at him. His gaze drifts to the walls, to the books, and for a minute he think he’s just appraising the collection, but then the light disappears from his eyes and he shoves a hand up to Yuuya’s face to shush him.

“What is—”

“Do you hear that?” he asks, voice low and light, moving with tiny steps towards a bookcase near the wall.

Yuuya doesn’t hear anything, but he indulges Yuuya with a frown, and strains his ears to listen. There is nothing but the pressing silence of the books all around him, and the sound of water dripping somewhere in the vicinity, though muffled and small.

“The water?” he asks, wondering if that’s what’s bothering him. “The ceiling has always had a problem with—”

“No,” Yuugo looks shaken, appalled, and Yuuya gently takes his hands in his again and squeezes them tightly. Yuugo’s eyes soften enough that his heart can stop beating so quickly, and he plants a quick peck to the top of Yuuya’s forehead. For Yuuya or for himself, he doesn’t know. “It’s not—It’s…”

This time, he leads, gently tugging at Yuuya’s wrist as he makes for the farthest wall of the archive, steps slow and calculated. Yuuya doesn’t know what it is that makes Yuugo so jumpy, so _uncertain_ , and part of him doesn’t want to find out. But Yuuya can’t tug him away, and he can’t leave him here, and that other part of him actually feels the adrenaline start pumping loud in his ears, drowning out all other sound but Yuuya’s breath and his.

Synchronized.

“It’s here,” Yuugo says so suddenly that it startles Yuuya, the hairs on the back of his neck standing straight, trying to catch a quick breath that he forgot to inhale. “It’s _somewhere_ here, that sound… and it’s…”

Yuugo reaches a tentative hand toward the bookcase and runs his fingers along their paper spines, searching for something Yuuya can’t quite understand.

“Yuugo?” he asks quietly, afraid to disturb him. “What is it?”

“There’s… a really strong presence here,” he replies, letting go of Yuuya’s hand to step closer to the bookcase. “It’s _suffocating_ , like I can’t breathe, and…”

Yuugo’s claws nick a particular chip in the bookcase, and there’s a silent click, so silent that Yuuya has to stop breathing just to hear it, and then the wood in front of them—a solid bookcase that Yuugo had _touched_ and scratched with his fingers—promptly _disappears out of existence_.

The wide expanse of a cave greets them.

“I knew it,” Yuugo says, not looking the least bit surprised as he steps forward toward the entrance. “It had been bothering me all summer, this magic that had been pricking at me and I couldn’t identify it because we were on the other side of the palace. You said no one comes by here, right?”

“A-As far as I know, only the officials stick around for a little while,” Yuuya stutters, jaw still slack at the passageway in front of him. “And even then… th-they’re gone really soon afterwards.”

“It’s not them,” Yuugo reassures, and begins his walk into the mouth of the cave without a look back. “Magic this powerful can’t be casted by a human, much less an official who has his entire day setup to be as busy as possible. And this… whoever did this wasn’t trying to hide it, just… just tried to keep whatever is in here from getting out. Like a cage to trap an animal, I guess.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Yuuya asks, following after Yuugo as the bookcase reappears behind them. “What if we release something dangerous?”

“I can take care of it.”

The cave stretches far into the unknown, twisting and turning with every few feet, made of smoothened stone and guided by floating lights reflected in the crystal stalagmites that dot their path. Yuuya is almost inclined to believe that it’s long enough to stretch outside of the palace. The archives are, after all, situated right next to the very wall that keeps outsiders and those unworthy at bay.

He feels something turn in his stomach, the very thought of finding out what’s at the end of the cave making his stomach churn.

Yuugo says he’ll take care of it, but—

Yuuya bumps straight into Yuugo’s still back, an apology on the edge of his tongue that’s washed away with the _horror_ in Yuugo’s eyes. His sapphires are clouded, unpolished, tinted with the blackest of fears and disbelief.

“Yuugo—?”

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” he’s cursing now, completely ignoring Yuuya as his gaze sweeps the room and lands immediately on the pool of water in the cove, the flash of green grass dotting the edge like a semblance of a river bank. He stops swearing, stops grounding out insults and instead falls to his knees with his fingers buried in his hair, electric sparks crackling from his white fingertips. “Fuck.”

“Yuugo!” Yuuya runs over and kneels down to support him, but Yuugo pushes him away.

“Yuuya, you don’t understand—” Yuugo is hysterical, eyes wide with barely suppressed despair. “Yuuya, she isn’t harmful, not at all, and—”

Yuuya tears his eyes from Yuugo’s panicked and horrified form to the pool of water across from them, glowing an ethereal cyan hue that water isn’t supposed to glow.

And then—

A splash of water, and Yuuya almost falls down in his shock.

The glow is not from the water itself, he realizes, as he watches a head of seafoam green hair rise from the depths, framed by sparkling pink jewelry and pastel-colored seashells. It is a woman, with skin that glows and shines, patches of emerald scales along her arms, and—fins?

 _Fins_.

Mint green and pink seashells and amber eyes that shine like the sun, hands that bring back to life the driest of plants, and even insects are caught in her gaze. As she pulls herself out of the water, Yuuya watches her skin mold into more and more scales, until there is nothing but a blanket covering on her legs—on her _tail_.

“Yuugo,” her voice echoes through the cave, hopeful, yet sorrowful, as she turns her eyes to the ground in shame. It is rich, melodious, a beautiful note even in her despair, a tune that rings out and sooths the shocks in Yuugo’s frame, flattens the bursts of electricity from his fingers. “Yuugo, is that—”

Yuuya suddenly remembers with dread what Yuugo had said when they first entered this cave.

 _Like a cage to trap an animal_.

“ _Rin_!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment ur comments sustain me and give me fuel  
> dies


	4. 竹葉船

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW thanks everyone for sticking with me all this way, because this is basically the point where the plot finally starts picking up  
> this chapter ended up being a startling 8,700 words and i feel like coughing up blood. i think i spent the entirety of may writing this and i was sick for 90% of it
> 
> art for this chapter was commissioned from [choctopi](http://choctopi-rising.tumblr.com/) & [ignei](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&tab=userpage&id=150088)

There is a numbness that encompasses his body much like how he had felt the one time he had been poisoned as a child. It wasn’t poison meant for him, nor his father, but for his mother, the empress of common birth, and it was a day that Yuuya remembered that he had been particularly hungry while his mother had not. In exchange, he’d eaten his mother’s share of the food as well and, thinking back on it now, perhaps that was for the best.

The poison had taken his whole body and reduced him to a shaken, pale-faced mess, the blood draining from his cheeks and his figure while the toxin worked its magic. His mother had been worried sick herself, practically turning the same white as he was with her defiant stubbornness to not leave his bedside. His father, for all of the court’s politics and unending joy even in the face of that, had frowned for the first time that Yuuya had ever seen in his life.

That was the first but not only time Yuuya had been subjected to the ugliness that lied within his own palace walls, too small to understand then but knowing too much of it now.

He can see why Yuugo prefers not to interact with the servants and the officials of the castle, only living through Yuuya’s retellings of his day when they meet in the afternoon. He never understood it until now—until he lays his eyes on the weeping mermaid across the cavern and the way _Yuugo_ , who had complained endlessly about his soiled hanfu whenever he got _crumbs_ on it, doesn’t care about the state of his clothes as he lets it dip into the water to hold Rin’s hand.

Yuugo had told him when they entered the cavern: _a cage to hold an animal_ , and that had been all Yuuya heard when he gazed at Rin earlier. Now, however, he remembers another clue, another piece of information.

 _A human couldn’t have cast this_.

The numbness is hard, bearing down on him, pushing Yuuya to his knees with a startled gasp that renders the atmosphere _shredded_ when he loses his balance and feels the cold, hard stone of the floor at the back of his head. For some reason, he doesn’t hurt from falling down, nor from anything else but the crushing weight in his chest that seeks to rip his heart out even though there is nothing in the air above him besides stone and—

—“ _Yuuya—_ ”

—and then darkness.

Blackness.

He can’t see; he can’t hear; he can’t speak.

 _Yuuya_...

A voice, and, it sounds like it’s his but it’s not. It’s not because Yuuya can’t speak and he can’t _hear_ so why is he hearing _this_? His mind’s voice is always his own voice but _this_ voice is… darker, more sinister. It’s not _his_ but it sounds like him. He can feel Yuugo’s hands on his shoulders, shaking him, but Yuuya can’t _move_. He can’t do anything except lay there helplessly.

A hand against his chest—no, it feels more like a _claw_ —shredding the expensive silk beneath it until his heart is next and Yuuya tries to open his mouth to scream, but—

“Yuuya!”

The world rushes back to him and Yuuya gasps for breath as if he were an infant just born, a scream on the edge of his lips but it is fading quickly with his swimming vision and Yuugo’s desperate “ _Yuuya, Yuuya_ ”s in his ear.

Rin is beside him, too, casting worried golden glances at him, and then around the room, as if she knew what exactly had happened despite Yuugo trying to ask him and Yuuya drowning most of it out. Her hair is long, reaches down to the small of her back and styled in the most elegant of pearl accessories, but right now it looks like dead seaweed splayed over the sea rocks and there are rings of black under her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asks her instead, the words tumbling out, even though Yuuya was the one who had collapsed to the floor and felt his life almost leave him. Yuugo stops in his questions, his roaming hands trying to calculate the damage Yuuya must have taken from an impact with the stone but Yuuya feels no pain. There’s nothing. Just emptiness.

Rin startles, jumping back just the tiniest bit and a sentence about to splutter out from the edge of her lips but instead she clamps her mouth shut and clenches her fists. Her eyes are fixed on him, maybe past him, but they won’t leave him for whatever reason.

“Y-Yes,” she swallows, eyes finally darting down as if entranced in the way her seafoam green scales reflect in the cavern’s magical light. “But you were… you _weren’t_.”

“What happened?” Yuugo asks for him, one hand still curled around his waist, supporting him, and the other trying to find his pulse.

“He came, and he wanted to take you, b-but you weren’t… ready,” Rin visibly cringes at the last part, and curls her tail closer to herself. “He—”

“Who’s _he_?” Yuuya finds his voice again through the shock and swimming consciousness even though he feels as though he’s about to fall over again.

Rin falls silent for a long minute, her fingers digging into the stone, her eyes focused intently in the way her nails scratch the surface of the floor and leaves a trail behind it. Like this, when Yuuya can finally see her correctly outside of the depth of her pond prison and in plain sight, he can see the way her tail fin twitches, her scales rattling with her shaking.

“The same one who put me here,” she says, voice quiet. “The one with the sunset scales...”

“But why?” he feels dread pool in his stomach and, with the way Rin immediately pulls her hands up to wrap around herself as if she were cold despite it being the middle of a scorching summer, isn’t sure he wants to know why.

“Rin?” Yuugo gently reaches for her and her hands and he squeezes them and Rin gives him a half-smile: a half-tired and half-scared smile, hidden behind the fake creases near her eyes and the pure terror in the depths of her pupils. “You don’t have to say it if it makes you uncomfortable. I’ll get you out of here real quick, okay? I’ll dispel this kidnapper’s magic in an _instant_.”

“You can’t,” she shakes her head and looks up at the ceiling and the hanging stalagmites. “This magic is too strong. It’ll never break.”

“Then watch me,” Yuugo snaps, snarls, places Yuuya on the floor and in Rin’s care as he shifts from a porcelain white human to a porcelain white beast of four legs and curled horns and towering feathered wings. Sometimes Yuuya forgets the beast he is inside with his gentle hands and embarrassed flush, but right now he remembers all too clearly.

A servant of the Heavens. A mythical beast who creates kings. A creature who can create tornados with naught but a flap of his wings.

Yuugo roars, his echoes resounding through the cave, and glowing blue script appears below him, writing itself in a circle around his body. Yuuya can’t read them; they’re nothing like the characters he learns in his tutoring sessions.

Yuugo _roars_ , and the script spreads wide still in its circle formation until it reaches the edge of the cavern and flashes a bright white that Yuuya has to cover his eyes from with the sleeve of his hanfu. Rin does the same beside him and squeezes her eyes shut.

There is the sound of shattering glass, and then—

—nothing.

Yuugo snarls, dragging a hoof across the ground repeatedly as if meaning to charge the wall, because _it didn’t work_ and what magic would this cavern be that even such a creation of the gods themselves couldn’t break it?

“Stop it, Yuugo!” Rin’s hair accessories glow, and just as Yuugo begins to bull rush horns-first at the wall, a green flower pattern appears below his hooves and sends him crashing down to the ground with a surprised yelp and a pained gasp as he hits the stone head first.

“ _Rin_!”

“I-I’m sorry, Yuugo, b-but… if you touched that barrier, you could have _died_.”

“But I could have taken it! My magic is really strong!” Yuugo protests as he forces himself back up again, throwing a worried glance at Rin as he rises. “Whoever put you here, I’ll rip him apart. I’ll rip this entire spell _apart_ , and—”

“The reason I’m here…” Rin looks at Yuuya again, ignoring Yuugo completely as she lowers herself onto her elbows, and then leans forward until her head is resting on the cushion she’s built of her arms, face obscured and shoulders shaking. Her tail seems to curl around her body as if to comfort her. “H-He wants…”

“Rin,” Yuuya finds himself saying, reaching out to try and help her but she shakes her head as much as she shakes her shoulders.

“I-If you eat a mermaid’s flesh… you become immortal.”

* * *

Summer became a blur of unnaturally cyan water and stone-gray walls like the black iron bars of an impenetrable cage. Yuugo could no longer care about court politics or the need to teach Yuuya how to navigate through the murky abyss of cruel ambition and sneering officials, not with the discovery of Rin’s imprisonment. If Yuuya held that against him, he didn't say anything about it, instead clamping down on his feelings the same way he ignored the problems that had been brewing in his court.

Yuugo spent every waking moment in the cavern, accompanying Rin and guarding her from the assailant that could be back any moment. He sat, shoulders hunched, brows knit together, a permanent look of frustration on his face as every magic he could ever call upon had been no match for the barrier’s strength and resilience. Rin only watched on with sad eyes and even sadder heart, trying to tell Yuugo that it was _alright_.

 _It is not alright_ , Yuugo would growl, frustration nipping in his voice, and then he'd try again. And again. And again.

“Don't you want to leave this cave?” Yuuya asks one day as they watch Yuugo angrily patrol the edges of the spell and try tricks he'd already tried before, but even persistence and stubbornness cannot break the barrier. Rin had told him as much.

Silence.

“Yes,” the pause before her answer throws Yuuya off as he turns around to blink at her, but Rin is staring intently at Yuugo, her eyes softening. “And no.”

“No?” Yuuya echoes, bewildered.

“In order to become immortal by eating mermaid flesh, the mermaid has to give consent at their death,” Rin’s eyes still haven't left Yuugo, but they momentarily flicker over to Yuuya. “It is the act of giving the immortal mermaid’s life span to another person, and so we will die afterwards.”

She still hasn't answered his question.

“But you are stuck here,” Yuuya tries again.

Rin gives him a mysterious smile, one laced with the slight droop of the corners of her lips and the softening of her golden eyes. They flicker in the magical light, running through a hundred emotions at once—fear, uncertainty, acceptance, contentment—but ultimately land on something akin to affection. Yuuya is taken aback at the look she gives him, and the widening of her small smile is the only indication she gives that she understands and acknowledges his bafflement.

“I have Yuugo,” she turns her eyes back to the servant of the gods across the cavern, and something almost like a laugh falls from her lips, and Yuuya sees a glimpse of the woman Rin was before her imprisonment: carefree and happy, but it's gone again with her distant look. Yuuya feels something in his gut clench at the way she looks so fondly at Yuugo, but he chases that ugly feeling away quickly. “He is recklessly stubborn, and brash, and never really thinks before he acts, but I…”

Her words trail off, a dim realization starting to make its way across her face.

“I missed him,” she says slowly, and then quietly, so quietly that Yuuya strains to hear her next words: “I love him.”

He wishes he never heard them.

He supposes that it's only _fair_ , after all. Yuugo and Rin are eternal, while he is not, and for a human to dream of touching and pinning the heavens down to his beck and call is absurd and nothing but a fantasy. Yuuya should have never presumed that he could do it just because Yuugo had appeared before him, when a creature such as he would forget about Yuuya in the years to come. Yuuya could die the next day, but Yuugo...

He doesn't notice the way Rin bites her lip and shakes her head, and retreats back into her pond prison with a look of quiet acceptance and sorrow.

He doesn’t notice that it isn’t Yuugo’s name she whispers afterwards.

* * *

A rainstorm racks them afterwards for a few days, and the archive is closed off because the archivist has gone to visit his family. Yuugo can very well ignore the locks on the door and go through to spend time with Rin regardless, but Yuuya convinces him otherwise. Yuugo fights, worry on his face, in his frame, and he looks haggard around the edges. If he were human, perhaps he’d even be a bit thinner with the amount of food he stopped eating, but heavenly beings do not need nutrition.

They at least send her a message about their absence. Yuuya knows Rin wouldn’t mind—she said as much, suddenly, one day, and asked him to spend as much time with Yuugo as he could. Yuuya didn’t understand—and still doesn’t—why she’d push them off when she was trapped in her prison alone.

The rain creates slides of water down the ornate red poles of the castle’s porches, catching other drops along the way. Yuuya holds an experimental arm out to catch the rain, watching as his sleeves and hand are quickly soaked by the falling water.

If he looks close enough on his red sleeves, the water travelling down almost looks like blood.

 _Immortality_.

He shakes his head.

“You know,” Yuugo speaks up first from inside the room, his hair messy and sticking in many more directions than normal. If Yuuya didn’t know that Yuugo is immortal, he would have thought that Yuugo aged in the past few weeks. The heavenly being has always been a pale white, a coloring representative of the skies he comes from, but now that pale white looks almost like ash gray. “This rain reminds me…”

Yuuya withdraws his hand from the outside and retreats back into the parlour room they have taken up, closing the set of ornate doors behind him. Yuugo may be frustrated and stressed, but even in this state, he is still ethereal.

“Reminds you of what?” Yuuya crosses the room in two paces and takes the seat at the table across from Yuugo. He gently takes Yuugo’s hands— _claws_ , did Yuugo always have claws?—in his own, and the smile that he gives him in return (tired, but grateful, and _adoring_ ) makes Yuuya’s heart flutter.

“Wherever a dragon goes, it rains.”

“Are we being visited by dragons right now?”

“Who knows,” Yuugo snorts, smiles, and then shakes his head. “Most of the dragons I’ve met are a bunch of pompous ass—I mean, pompous people.”

Yuuya stifles a laugh. “I’ll take your word for it.”

They fall into another silence, with only the raindrops on the stone roof above to accompany them. Yuuya looks down at the hands in his grasp, the perfectly smooth skin and white pigment a stark contrast against his tanned ones. It’s… beautiful, in a way.

Sometimes the differences between them make Yuuya happy. Hurts less when it does, he knows, and he can instead dream about how, of all the humans Yuugo could have met, seen, or spent time with, it was Yuuya he chose in the end. There’s a tiny voice in his mind that tells him it’s because he’s Sakaki Yuushou’s son, royalty, a prince, not because he’s _special_.

“Yuuya? Yuuya!”

Yuuya jolts to attention with a startled gasp and a series of confused blinks. Yuugo is shaking his shoulders, looking far more worried than he should be. Did he space out so much that he didn’t even notice Yuugo getting up from the table and detangling their hands?

“Yuugo?” he tries, and suddenly it feels like his throat is hoarse and he hasn’t had water in days.

“Are you okay?” Yuugo steps forward, and suddenly Yuuya feels the warmth of his body envelope him and the white sleeves of his hanfu wrap around his frame.

Yuugo is hugging him.

He’s sure he can feel his flush all the way down to his neck. “Y-Yes,” he stutters, caught off guard by the open affection. He feels like a child again, in his mother’s embrace, because no one else dares to get close to him, much less _touch_ him.

Affection is—he likes it. Yuuya craves it. That Yuugo is so willing to give…

“Are you sure?” Yuugo is staring into his eyes with an intensity that deepens the flush on Yuuya’s face, and he knows that Yuugo is concerned about his well-being and nothing else currently, but Yuuya’s thoughts drift too easily. “You spaced out for a moment, and I was trying to get your attention but you didn’t answer me.”

“Y-Yeah,” Yuuya manages, and Yuugo looks him over once more before beginning to shift away from him, and Yuuya grabs his wrist faster than his brain can process his action. Yuugo blinks, surprised, and Yuuya isn’t sure he has a good excuse to follow up. He swallows. “It’s, um… It’s cold outside, and you know it’s… easier… to feel warm if we… stay together.”

“Why didn’t you say you were cold?” Yuugo laughs—and it’s not fake, _never_ fake, not like the way Yuuya does it. Even if the world should crush him, Yuugo always comes back, and that is yet another thing that Yuuya both admires and envies him for. Rin is still in the confines of her prison and Yuugo still hasn’t been able to break the spell, but with her gentle words and his boundless confidence, he doesn’t feel depressed by it. Enraged, yes, frustrated, definitely. Yuugo is too headstrong to let the bad thoughts deter him when he has a goal to accomplish.

 _Rin doesn’t want that_ , Yuugo had said to Yuuya when he asked. _She’s sad when I’m sad. I need to stay strong for her. I don’t want Rin to be sad._

Yuugo sits down on the same bench that Yuuya is sitting on, letting their hanfu catch on the edges of the table as he repositions to wrap his arms around Yuuya again. “Better?”

Yuuya nests his head under the crook of Yuugo’s chin, and exhales softly.

“Yeah, a lot,” he smiles, hidden in the jut of Yuugo’s collarbone. “Thank you.”

Yuugo’s arms wrap a tiny bit tighter. “Anything for you.”

Yuuya wishes they could spend the rest of his life like this, nestled in each other, enjoying the warmth and the gentle staccato of the raindrops outside, tucked in a cloudy haze of affection and love.

* * *

His birthday is soon.

It’s not the sudden liveliness of the palace that reminds him—though the constant fittings and decorating and the sound of servants running to and fro the different corners of the palace are hard to ignore—and it’s certainly not the way the entire court buzzes in a mix of anticipation and suspense. When he turns eighteen, which will only be in a week, Yuuya will assume the throne and finally be Emperor in name.

It is not only his birthday, but also his coronation, all in one.

No, Yuuya knows it’s almost his birthday because he wants to spend it with Yuugo. A day to themselves, after all the festivities, and Yuugo can finally see the emperor he will be in all his glory and after all his training. Yuugo no longer cares about court politics anymore, not with Rin still held prisoner, but Yuuya wishes to get his mind off of something so hopeless. He knows it’s hopeless, because Yuugo still has not made a breakthrough in the past two weeks. Rin tells him as much, and every day she grows more and more comfortable with her prison.

But even through all this, Yuuya is—

(There’s a dryness in his throat every time he stumbles upon the cave in the afternoons, after court has ended, and Yuugo is there with his dirty white hanfu trying to dispel the magic and barriers around her. He tells Rin he’ll do it, that _this time_ he’ll be sure to make it work, and he looks at her with such yearning and adoration and _love_ that Yuuya feels like he’s swallowing needles when he looks upon them.)

— _selfish_.

“My coronation is next week,” Yuuya says one day when they are enjoying another bout of alone time, when Rin has chased Yuugo out after all his failed attempts and pleaded with him to enjoy what little time he has left on the earth. Soon, he’ll be required to guard the heavens again, never allowed to leave unless at the whim of the gods.

“Is it?” Yuugo blinks in surprise, head turning towards Yuuya to give him a better look, and Yuuya feels as though he’s being _assessed_ again, by this being who creates kings. “Wow, you’re becoming old—ow!”

Yuuya huffs and tugs petulantly at the strands of blue hair in his hands. Yuugo is turned away in front of him, seated with a pout as Yuuya braids his hair the same way his mother braids his. _It relieves stress_ , she’d told him once and he never really understood it but, now, while he has Yuugo’s hair in his hands, he understands: the feeling of being able to be so close to someone you care about, and then _caring_ for them.

He pulls a completed braid across the back of Yuugo’s head and towards the ponytail he’s making, pinning it into place with one of his mother’s many bejeweled hair pins. This time, it’s bright sapphire, to match his hair and his eyes (and his blood).

“I wanted to say thanks, for everything, and…” Yuuya flounders, looking towards the strands of silk tresses in his hands for some sort of answer. “I’m sorry about—”

“It’s not your fault,” Yuugo interrupts just as quickly. “You didn’t know about her. You didn’t put her there. Whoever did, I’m going to repay them _double_ what they’ve done to her.”

There’s a dangerous tone, a growl from low in Yuugo’s throat that sends shivers down Yuuya’s spine at those words, and he is painfully reminded that while Yuugo may have a humanoid form, he is still a beast all the same. A beast with fangs and piercing electric blue eyes, and wings that can call forth tornadoes.

Yuuya releases a shaky breath.

“I’ll follow wherever you go,” he says instead with a soft smile, continuing the braid in his fingers. “I hope it gets resolved soon, too.”

“Yeah…” Yuugo heaves a sigh and leans forward just the slightest bit to rest his face his hands. Yuuya loosens the grip on his hair to let him shift.

There’s silence for a short while as Yuugo closes his eyes and drifts off in thought, and Yuuya completes yet another braid to tie into place. He likes it like this, hot summer days spent inside with nothing but each other’s presence and the words between them. It’s… almost romantic, in a way. He laughs at the thought.

“What’s so funny?” Yuugo turns his head slightly to look at Yuuya. “If you’re doing something bad with my hair—”

“Aw, don’t you trust me?” Yuuya scoffs, but bites his lower lip to hold back his laughter, and finishes off the ponytail with a tight ribbon that makes Yuugo wince again.

Yuugo grumbles. “Yes, but that hurts.”

“The pain will fade after your head gets used to it.”

Yuugo retrieves a nearby hand mirror and tilts it wildly around his face and head, observing the neat braids in-between swaths of loose hair, using his claws to poke and prod at them. Yuuya gets up from his spot and stifles another snicker, though he’s done nothing nefarious with it. Yuugo’s reaction is good enough by itself for something as harmless as this.

He brushes off his red hanfu and adjusts the pin in his own hair. “So, I’ll see you next week at the coronation?” he asks hopefully.

Yuugo’s movement stills.

“... Yuugo?”

“A-Ah?” Yuugo looks up from the mirror and flashes a smile at Yuuya. Something isn’t right about it, he can _feel it_ , because he’s smiled enough fake smiles to recognize one when he sees it. Why is Yuugo—? “Yeah, sure. I can’t wait!”

Yuuya smiles his own fake, betraying the nervousness in his stomach. “I look forward to it.”

* * *

They find the rain again later, when Yuuya has come back from another fitting and measuring session and Masumi is buried up to her neck in fabric that’s to be made into his hanfu for the coronation and then the celebration afterwards. His mother lets him off with a quick kiss to his forehead and an understanding look as he had grown more and more restless standing in his own bedroom.

It's the sound of the rain on the stones of the cave this time, creating a muted symphony of raindrops against the rocks, thundering both outside and inside. Yuugo ignores the sound for the most part, but Rin tilts her head back and closes her eyes, relishing the music and humming a low tune under her breath with the gentleness of the rain.

It must be sad, trapped here in this cave, not allowed to go outside or feel the real rain against her skin, or to see the sun and the sky afterwards.

Yuuya feels the guilt that gnaws at him at the back of his mind, the guilt for ever feeling _jealous_ of Rin and her predicament. He had never wanted to be in her position, but—to have someone’s full attention because of their worry for him… but for his freedom and independence in exchange, that is too big of a price.

『 **谁的歌声轻轻、轻轻唱，**

 **谁的泪水静静淌？** 』

The notes hit him softly, and Yuuya belatedly realizes that Rin has turned from humming to singing: a gentle voice that carries with the rain outside, almost like a lullaby for a stormy night. Yuugo has a smile on the edge of his lips, leaning back and letting his head rest against the stone wall as she continues. It’s one of the rare days where he is not throwing himself bodily into the barrier, and they can enjoy each other’s company like this, with however much time Yuugo has left on the earth.

『 **愿化一双鸟儿去飞翔，**

 **任身后哭号嘶喊着也追不上。** 』

Suddenly, Yuuya scrambles up, stepping on his hanfu in the process, and Rin’s song stops long enough for him to make it from one end of the cave to the other, bundling his robes in his hands as he runs.

“Yuuya!”

“Yuuya, where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back!” he calls, sprinting through the cave system and back to the archives.

Yuuya makes his way outside, uncaring of the rain that falls on him, his hair, his face, the clothes he wears that are expensive enough to pay for an entire village’s meal for a month. He trudges to the bamboo stalks on the far side of the garden, mostly there for decoration than anything else, and tugs the leaves off of them until he’s got a wet handful of greenery.

His father had taught him a long time ago, when he was eleven and the sun had finally started shining after a week of rain, how to fold bamboo leaves into the shape of boats. Yuuya hadn’t given it much thought, thinking the small, fragile little plant to just be another distraction that his father heaped upon him to distract him from the more important matters of the court. _I’m not a child anymore, I’m eleven,_ he’d said, but his father just smiled and ruffled his hair as if he were no more than five again.

 _I know, Yuuya_.

The mud tracks into the edges of his hanfu, staining the red fabric with splotches of brown and turning the once beautiful garment into a sopping, rain-soaked heap that only wears him down as he starts to make his way back. It makes a loud, jarring _squelch_ with each step he takes, feet sinking into the mud, rainwater pouring into his shoes, but Yuuya steadfastly ignores it.

There will be holes in his shoes later—this he knows. The hanfu he wears will be washed and washed for all the royal servants can try to remove the mud, but it will be a long, arduous process that will no doubt be broken by the order to forsake it. _Wasteful_ , Yuugo would say and disapprove, if he ever knew. _Wasteful_.

Perhaps these bamboo leaves in his hand are like peace offerings to the gods to forgive him for the sins he has wrought.

But he knows they aren't—they are for Rin. Not Yuugo, not the gods, and not himself, but for the mermaid who sings a long, sorrowful song about the world outside and how she can no longer see it anymore. Yuuya may be selfish, and easily envious, but he knows that they will be all that each other have once Yuugo leaves this world. And Rin deserves nothing of his malice when she has lost everything.

He makes it back to the cave, dragging puddles of water at his feet as he walks further in, wading pools as if he were entering the riverbed. The wad of bamboo leaves are still clutched in his hand, held onto so tightly that the tips of his fingers turn the same white of a Bai Ze’s skin tone. His hair clings to his face and his skin, running rivulets of water down the green and red locks like blood.

“Yuuya!” Yuugo gets up to greet him, and the surprise and worry in his features is something that warms Yuuya’s heart more than the shelter of the cave against the storm outside.

There is magic tickling at the edge of his skin as Yuugo removes the water from his hanfu, but Yuuya ignores it and walks further until he is right in front of Rin and her cyan prison.

“Yuuya?” she asks, softer than Yuugo.

“M-My father used to tell me,” he starts, his mouth dry, as if he hasn't just walked back in from the pouring rain outside. “Ships at a distance… carry wishes aboard.”

He sits down on the ground, legs crossed under him, and smooths out the wet bamboo leaves that are still in his hands. They have curled almost protectively over themselves, helped by the rain, and Yuuya spends a long minute folding them back into their original shape.

 _Bamboo is strong, versatile_ , his father had said, folding two leaves together to create the beginnings of a hull for the boat—a motion that Yuuya repeats as Rin and Yuugo watch, confused. _When it rains, it bends with the wind. But after the rain, it stands straight again._

He drags a nail down the spine of a leaf, splitting it vertically in the middle as he threads a third one through the hole, like pulling needle and thread, the way he’s seen Masumi work even as he stands uselessly in the center of the room, being fitted by assistants. It’s the same when he sees his mother stretch a square piece of fabric over a circle frame and embroiders water and lilies into the seams, though his fingers are clumsy, and he’s using bamboo leaves instead of thread.

What forms as a result is messy, nothing like his father’s much more beautiful and well put-together boat, but Yuuya exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and offers it reverently between his palms to Rin.

“I know you can’t leave, so I thought, maybe…” he leans forward and lets the water lap gently at his fingertips, not yet letting the small, bamboo leaf boat go from his hands. “E-Even if this isn’t a real ship… or a real boat… it comes from outside, a-and it can hold your wishes, too.”

The silence that follows makes him swallow, but then Rin’s hands cup his, and she coaxes the tiny boat away from his hands to flow gently into the water. Despite its rickety construction, it floats just fine, and Yuuya watches as it makes its merry little way across the cyan pool, propelled by the tiny currents Rin creates with her tail. She smiles at him—radiant, shining, the shadows behind her eyes gone for just that moment—and takes his hands in hers.

They are smooth, so smooth that they’re almost slippery, and Yuuya can feel the tiny ridges and bumps of the patches of green scales that grow along her skin. The spaces between her fingers have the tiniest bit of sheen and gleam, and something transparent rests between them. It’s almost like her fins, and Yuuya startles as he realizes that her hands are webbed when in the water.

“Thank you,” she says, softly, with a smile that reaches her eyes. “I appreciate it. I really do. Maybe you could… show me how to make one, sometime?”

He forgets how to speak for the briefest moment, before he nods quickly with a: “Y-Yes, of course!” and somewhere behind him, Yuugo laughs.

Rin lets go of his hands to sink back into the water, gently maneuvering her way over to the bamboo leaf boat which has floated quite a ways away.

“Thank you, too,” Yuugo says beside him, a grin plastered on his face. “For offering to take care of her. I know I have to go soon, but… I’ll try to sneak back down, okay?”

Yuuya laughs. “Don’t get in trouble, Yuugo,” he teases, bumping shoulders with him. “Take your time, okay?”

“Time in Heaven moves slower than time here,” Yuugo replies, eyes turning down towards the water. “If I come back, it’ll be—”

“A long time from now?” Yuuya finishes for him, though his own heart clenches at the thought. “That’s okay. I’ll wait.”

“Will you?”

“Yes. So come back soon, okay?”

“Okay. Please look after Rin, too.”

“I promise.”

They are interrupted by a choked sob, though the sound seems almost surreal that Yuuya feels as though he’s imagined it. Rin is further in the pool, the bamboo boat floating between the confines of her hands, and her shoulders are shaking. Yuuya gets up immediately, Rin’s name on his lips, because if he _hadn’t_ imagined that noise—

She turns around, the tears streaming down her cheeks but the smile hasn’t left her face. “Y-You guys are… so silly!” she laughs, swimming back over with a powerful flick of her tail. “You’re making me c-cry in… l-laughter…!”

“Riiin!” Yuugo whines, pouting, as he crosses his arms and his cheeks turn blue.

Yuuya, though, grins and laughs along with Rin’s shaky giggles, and Yuugo’s flustered embarrassment is more than enough of a reward for them.

* * *

The days pass like a blur afterwards, as if time did not want them together longer than they needed to be, and Yuuya finds himself staring at the ceiling of his room, dressed in his sleepwear and awaiting the tomorrow of his birthday and coronation. Rin had pulled him aside earlier in the day, when Yuugo was too preoccupied with bringing down the barrier, again, and talked to him in a hushed whisper that betrayed how she wrung her hands together and fidgeted tightly with her fingers.

“I found it,” she’d said, with a sad smile and a forlorn look, with eyes that stared past him rather than at him. “I know how to escape from here. And then neither you nor Yuugo will have to worry about me anymore.”

“Really? We should tell Yuugo—”

“Don’t,” her hand on his wrist had tightened, and she had taken a deep breath. “Don’t tell him. It has to be a surprise. Tomorrow’s your birthday, right? I’ll show you tomorrow… and… I have a birthday gift for you.”

And with him sworn to secrecy, Rin had let him go.

Something hadn’t felt right in her voice, the way she shifted her eyes away from his face, and the calm acceptance of… of _something_ in her frame, how she held herself with a weary tiredness. But Yuuya hadn’t dwelled too much on it, finding the prospect of Rin’s freedom _exciting_ , and so he’d pushed it to the back of his mind to think about later.

_Clink._

Yuuya blinks, barely registering the noise as the sound his window makes when it opens before he hears something drop down and—

_An assassination? Right before the coronation?_

He feels the breath stop in his lungs and squeezes his eyes shut in response, trying to fool the would-be assassin into thinking that he’s asleep, like he should be. The footsteps draw closer, and Yuuya’s hand tries to reach for the bell pull at the corner of his bed, ever so discreetly, trailing his fingers over his sheets as if he were moving in his sleep.

“Yuuya.”

All at once, he feels the adrenaline leave his system in an instant.

“Y-Yuugo?” he whips his head around quickly, eyes widening and jaw going slack in surprise. “What are you doing here so late? The coronation doesn’t start for another few hours, until the sun begins to rise.”

“I know,” Yuugo’s voice is tired, and he closes the remaining gap from the window to his bed, and finds a seat at the edge of the mattress. “I know, but I have to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

A sigh, a deep inhale, and then: “I can’t go to your coronation.”

Yuuya sits up immediately, knocking the covers and sheets off of him as he scrambles up to reach out for Yuugo, grabbing a hold of his sleeve as if to not let him go. “Wh-Why?” he says, _demands_ , as he tugs desperately at the transparent sleeve in his fingers. “Why can’t you come? You said you’d be able to… y-you said…”

“I’m sorry,” Yuugo catches Yuuya’s hand, curling his fingers between the spaces, and leans forward to drag his thumb across his cheek. “I know I said I could b-but I couldn’t… tell you I couldn’t… but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Yuuya echoes, the word foreign on his tongue. “You’re leaving tonight?”

“I have to,” Yuugo gently tugs at Yuuya’s chin, and presses their foreheads together like he had done the first day he declared he’d help Yuuya reach the golden throne of his birthright. His eyes are no less sad, the light behind his blue pupils dimmed. “I’m sorry.”

 _I’m sorry_.

“Please, don’t go yet—”

“The gods are calling me, I have to. I’ve already… pushed my time allowance to its limit. A Bai Ze can only appear to mourn a wise king, or during the existence of one. If I don’t go back…”

“Then,” Yuuya feels a rush of desperation through his body, maybe intermingled with things like _foolishness_ and _courage_ and _sorrow_. He pulls Yuugo’s hands away from his face to hold in front of him, lightly tugging until Yuugo falls bonelessly, willingly, on top of him. “Don’t go just yet.”

“Yuuya—”

“Just for tonight.”

Yuugo’s claws dig into the sheets, and Yuuya can hear the tear of fabric underneath his talons. Despite this being in front of him having the ability to tear him to shreds, Yuuya doesn’t feel the slightest amount of fear.

“Yuuya, I...”

“If you don’t want to—”

“I do,” Yuugo’s hands are on his face again, the edges of his sapphire hair tickling Yuuya’s neck, the soft pads of his fingers caressing his jaw. There is a heat there that Yuuya only notices now, and, for once, he feels the flush spread across his own cheeks, to the tips of his ears, and down the expanse of his neck. “I do.”

They say goodbye with their mouths, with naught but silent words said through gasps of breath, puffs of hot air, lips trailing down flesh and skin and worshipping the path it treads. Fabric, clothes, and hair is pushed away, making roads for exploring hands and a following tongue, succeeded by beads of sweat that drip down their skin.

Summer romances are something that Yuuya has only read in novels and storybooks, heard told through the servants’ gossip and laughter, and he has never understood why anyone would ever subject themselves to something so temporary. But Yuugo’s hands along his thighs, his mouth against his skin, whispering words of praise and wonder into his flesh as if Yuuya would not be able to hear them—he finally understands. There is no greater feeling than the heat of a fleeting romance, of clinging so desperately to one another knowing that time will undo them.

It is his last memory of summer, of the heat haze, of Yuugo’s voice distorted with gasps that match perfectly in time with his own. The way their skin slides together, against each other, Yuugo’s body moving in beat with his; it’s not something that Yuuya would ever trade for the world.

“Thank you... Yuuya...”

 _Love is when someone says your name, and it feels safe in their mouth_.

* * *

The bed is still warm in the morning, though tempered by the frost of the dawn air. But it is the only reminder and proof that the events of the previous night had occurred. Yuuya runs a hand along the warm space in the sheets, grasping for the last vestiges of that summer romance, lost as it is now with the day of his coronation and birthday.

 _I’ll follow you anywhere,_ he’d said once.

_How can I do that, when you go to where I can’t follow?_

But the first of the servants knock at his door, expensive heaps of hanfu in their hands moderated by another heap of accessories, and Yuuya acquiesces to the lull of a non-fantastical life again, leaving his bed and the warmness of the sheets behind.

* * *

 

His coronation is a big affair, that much Yuuya expects. His mother greets him with a warm smile as he emerges from the confines of his bedroom, dressed to the nines in red, gold, and white, like an Emperor should be. His mother is no different with her own set of clothes, and he returns her smile with his own.

“You look happier, today,” she’d said. “Brighter, even.”

“I do?” he had blinked in surprise.

“You do,” she’d replied, pushing her palms against his back and urging him to walk ahead of her, as was custom. “Did something nice happen overnight?”

Yuuya hides his smile in the sleeve of his hanfu. “Maybe.”

The entire kingdom greets him in his courtyard, knees pressed against the stones on the ground, heads bowed as he treads slowly, but steadily, towards the other side of the palace where the throne room awaits. There are servants who hold the trails of his hanfu behind him, careful to herd the long swaths of fabric away from touching anything but the red carpet he walks on. Summer bears its last rays on his skin, and Yuuya lets his mind flit away for the shortest while, thinking and dreaming of the days past.

When they pass the archives, Yuuya gives a glance at the archive doors, wondering if Rin had really found a way to escape, and if she had left with Yuugo the previous night. They are both immortals, and for them to return to the Heavens would be something that Yuuya wouldn’t be surprised at.

After all, his summer is over. The days of fantasy are gone, if only tempered by Rin’s promise that she would try to visit him later today after the festivities have ended.

They make their way further down along the red carpet, his mother ever present behind him with the brightest smile, and Yuuya feels himself starting to mimic her, because isn’t this day the day he’s always dreamed about? The day in which he will file away his nightmares as a bad child’s dream, and smile upon the world as he ascends to his birthright?

It is, so he smiles bright, and passes the kneeling court officials with an air of fluidity and grace that ignores all their scheming plans behind the fake submissiveness of their bow. Yuugo, though their lessons together had been interrupted by the revelation of Rin’s imprisonment, had taught him what he needs to know to navigate the court.

Even if he shall grow old when Yuugo visits him again, he hopes he can be the Emperor that his father was, to show Yuugo that he had not put their lessons to waste.

They reach the throne room with fanfare, the slow beating of drums to announce their arrival, and Yuuya stops for a moment to allow the music to play out. The doors open shortly after to let them in, and he glides through the threshold of the doors quickly, feeling the excitement pump through his veins.

“My Prince,” the eldest official of the court, and his soon-to-be advisor, greets him. “I welcome you to the throne.”

“I thank you for your consideration,” the conversation is rehearsed, so Yuuya goes through his paces like an actor reciting his lines. “I hope to serve the country like my father before me, and his father before him, and my many ancestors which have brought me to this day. For them, I thank for this opportunity.”

“Wise men may not be learned.”

“Learned men may not be wise.”

The elder smiles and nods, and Yuuya ascends the steps to his throne, stopping there to sweep his hanfu behind him and kneel like everyone else outside kneels. The elder carries the gold crown in his hands, though it is more of a pin than a crown. He feels the long needle slide through the knot in his hair, and the breath he had been holding exhales quickly through his mouth.

“Then let us pray that our Emperor is both a wise and learned man,” he says.

Yuuya stands up and turns around, feeling the clink of his crown’s hanging trinkets behind him, giving him a horizontal halo of gold.

“Our Emperor, Sakaki Yuuya.”

The cheers in his ears are something he will remember for a long time yet.

* * *

The feast afterwards is grand, extravagant, and Yuuya relishes in the feeling of the congratulations and wishes passed along by the men who used to work with his father. He relishes being the center of attention. The crown in his hair is not heavy, as he thought it would be, and sways perfectly in time with his movements, as if it were meant to be there.

He knows there are schemes in the dark, the dirty game of politics to navigate with his position, but for now, he lets himself indulge.

Yuugo had told him _thank you_ , as if Yuuya had contributed in any way to his life that would require a word of gratitude, but Yuuya feels as though that isn’t fair. It isn’t fair because Yuugo had done more for him than Yuuya had for Yuugo, because he clung to this mythical beast and drained what knowledge he could while Yuugo willingly gave.

“If you’re feeling tired, you can leave, now,” his mother says to him over a plate of finger food and desserts, having no shame in the amount she eats. “No one can blame you.”

“I will,” he says, and excuses himself.

As soon the doors close shut behind him, and he’s made it back to his room, Yuuya throws his hands up in the air and _laughs_.

Pure, unadulterated laughter that bubbles from his lungs, and he falls face-first into his bed in a fit of giggles.

Life feels so much easier with the crown on his head now. He has power, now. He has influence. Yuuya may want for none of those things, but it is the feeling of attention which he craves. In the end, perhaps he is just another greedy human, but he is a mortal who has attained the knowledge of the immortals.

There is a knock at his door, and Yuuya quickly smooths out his hair, tugging the stray strands of his crown pin back into place.

“Come in,” he says, still seated at his bed.

“C-Crown Pri—I-I mean, I’m sorry, E-Emperor Sakaki,” the meek maid on the other side of the door nearly trips over herself as she steps into the room, a tray carried between her hands. “H-Her Lady sent this up for you.”

_His mother?_

“Sure, just put it down on the parlor table,” he flashes her a comforting smile—the poor girl looks like she’s about to faint from fear of offending the Emperor—and gestures to the red table in the center of the room. The maid bows once, the tray surprisingly well balanced despite her nervousness, and sets it down on the table.

The flickering fire of his lamps catches a spot of her hair, and Yuuya blinks as he swears he sees purple, but it’s gone as soon as it’s come. A trick of the light, maybe?

“P-Please excuse me for bothering you,” she stops at the door and bows once again, as is custom, her legs almost tangling together with how shakily she walks. He doesn’t remember her face as one of his regular servants, or any of his mother’s, so perhaps it’s normal for a new servant to be so scared of him. It wouldn’t be the first time, anyway.

He nods once, and she scurries away from his room quickly, after closing the doors behind her.

Yuuya rises from his bed and goes over to the tray of food that’s been left on the parlour table, seating himself in front of it to examine its contents.

A fresh cup of tea, and fish.

Fish with wonderful and gleaming green scales, at that. He’s never seen anything like it.

“Did she buy some painted fish from a swindler, again?” he asks out loud, and feels another laugh start to bubble in his throat. Well, at least his mother never changes. It’s odd that the green seems almost real and not paint, but Yuuya just peels back the skin with his chopsticks and sticks the first piece of meat in his mouth.

It’s  _cold_ , as if it had just been taken from the water and not cooked at all. Yuuya swallows with a grimace, and reaches for the tea when it hits him.

He feels a burning in his chest, one that seeps from his abdomen to his throat, like bile rising from an unwanted dinner. And then he’s on the floor: coughing, hacking, trying to expel whatever he just swallowed back into the open but his body both rejects and accepts it all at once. It seeps into his flesh, seeks to crawl its way into the very essence of what makes Yuuya human, and then tears it apart. He spits saliva onto his hands, lungs heaving, throat contracting, body shaking and yet he still coughs, coughs so much until there’s a cry and the door slams open.

Briefly, he sees flashes of blue and gold, like a soft blur that rouses all of his senses so much so that Yuuya is delirious— _Yuugo? Yuugo?_ —and someone says something (maybe they shout it?) but he can’t hear anything.

He remembers something—it all comes crashing down, and then—

_“The reason I’m here…” Rin looks at Yuuya again, ignoring Yuugo completely as she lowers herself onto her elbows, and then leans forward until her head is resting on the cushion she’s built of her arms, face obscured and shoulders shaking. Her tail seems to curl around her body as if to comfort her. “H-He wants…”_

_“Rin,” Yuuya finds himself saying, reaching out to try and help her but she shakes her head as much as she shakes her shoulders._

_“I-If you eat a mermaid’s flesh—”_

Yuuya leans over and vomits immortality into his hands.

It’s red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and with this, we end yuugo's book. it isnt the end of the story in any way, but yuugo's chapters are done and we can make way for another yuu. that's not to say yuugo isnt coming back, because he is, but that won't be for a while
> 
> SO, EXPLANATIONS, because you guys deserve them
> 
> the song rin sings can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS604cOlgsM), and while i can't provide a good translation, my interpretation of it is about a girl who's about to married and spends her last summer marveling at the world and wondering for whom nature shines so beautiful. the lyrics rin sings in particular is the chorus of the second verse
> 
> _who is there singing, singing softly,_  
>  _whose tears are these that fall down cheeks?_
> 
> _there are a pair of birds that begin to fly,_  
>  _leaving he who cries he's left behind._  
>     
> as for that last part with yuuya  
> yes, that just happened. it's exactly what you think it is
> 
> if you have any more questions, feel free to stop by my [tumblr](http://shiunins.tumblr.com/ask)
> 
> thank you for your support as always! please leave a comment if you can ;u;  
> reading your comments always invigorates me to write more


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